Dinner For One, Exploring My Cooking Ability

It's a Sunday night and there's no work tomorrow (yay President's Day!), so I did the most logical thing I could think of and cooked myself a dinner that had me nursing multiple different cooking devices. I tend to avoid this type of cooking, mostly because I'm really bad at timing it all correctly. I vividly remember one time when I accidentally finished making my main meal 20 minutes before my side dish, so I essentially had to eat them completely separately, which ruined the whole point of my intended meal. My Achilles heel is usually in the amount of time it takes to warm up the oven or boil the water. Anyway, that one experience meant that I tend to not make complicated meals except when I'm feeling particularly adventurous. And today, I felt adventurous.

Tonight's dinner wouldn't win any awards or cooking competitions. I'm a huge fan of The Taste (the only cooking reality show I watch on TV) and I know that my palate is not well-developed. I'm an eat-to-live sort, not a live-to-eat. In essence, I eat only because my body tells me to, and not because I particularly enjoy the task. And since I don't particularly enjoy eating, why would I waste time cooking the meal?

I only have a few basic meals that are easy to cook and scale to cooking for one person--pasta, tacos, burgers, and chicken cutlets. Sometimes I cook extra to make lunches out of them, but I've also discovered that it's VERY easy to get tired of a meal by the time it becomes your dinner, then lunch, then another lunch all in a row. I don't have a good way around that, so I keep doing it and complain silently to myself with the hope that someday I'll come up with a better solution. Or stop cooking for one so much.

Yummy Dinner For One

Yet, every now and then, I just get that urge to go all-out. Tonight's dish was pasta and chicken. I told you it wasn't very refined, but I did spice and sauce it up a bit to give it a bit more flavor. Most surprisingly, at least to me, was that I timed the boiling of the water and the warming up of my George Foreman grill perfectly, so that all my chicken was finished grilling at the same time that my pasta finished cooking and my sauce was finished being warmed. I know, I'm a cooking genius. After cutting up some chicken and mixing it with the pasta, then throwing sauce all over it and adding in a little bit of spices (lemongrass seed and parsley), I siphoned off half the pasta to a future dinner or lunch. So really, I cooked for two, but this wasn't as egregious as most of my other cooking attempts over the years with multiple extra meals.

And that is how I cook for one. I wonder if my solo cooking would be more enjoyable if I took my cues from Hannah Hart of My Drunk Kitchen. If you've never heard of her, watch this video. All of her episodes are funny, but this is one of my favorites, mostly because of the brief struggle she has with the microwave/timer, a situation I encounter often (even after 18 months in my house):