Cooking for One: Variations

“The kitchen really is the castle itself. This is where we spend our happiest moments and where we find the joy of being a family.”
Mario Batali

Cooking For One: Variations

Straight up, you can order pizza every night. There is no one to judge you. You can have cold pizza for breakfast. Live how you want.

Making recipes from the thousands of cooking sites on the web can be frustrating. The assumption there is that you have all of the ingredients. For me, a dollop of sour cream means I have an almost full tub of unused sour cream along with all the other things that I bought to only use in small bits.

One solution is to make a crockpot of something and freeze half of it and resign yourself to the same dinner for the next three nights. Same with casseroles. If you love it, that is great.

Here is one cooking strategy that allows for difference each night but with the same basic foundation. You are going to make a hot sandwich using a tortilla.

The Basics for one week:
Three cloves of garlic
One white or sweet onion
Either mushrooms, squash, green pepper, something like that.
Burrito sized flour tortillas.
Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Extra Virgin Olive Oil is one of the big keys. It is healthy, like mondo healthy. It is good for the heart, brains, bones, fights diabetes. It is a good fat and we need it.

Put your skillet on the stove and add some oil.

Turn the heat to medium high. Chop of half a clove of garlic by pulling the smaller pieces out, pushing to flat of your knife blade down to easily get rid of the papery outsides and chop up the garlic into small pieces. Toss into the oil.

Slice about one-half an inch of your onion. Then dice it up small. Slide it off your cutting board into the oil.

Chop up your variable. Whether it is mushrooms or whatever, make them pretty small. This will make up at least twice of the volume of your garlic and onions together. Slide into the oil.

Stir a little. Maybe add some black pepper. Go check your email.

Check and stir now and then if you want. You are waiting to smell the garlic and make your neighbors jealous.

There are no real hard rules. You want the garlic soft from the cooking but you want a little crunch from the vegetables too.

Almost done? The basic stuff is done that you’ll do all week. So, now to add variations so you don’t get bored. I like to toss in two eggs and scramble them up or some pastrami meat or a small can of tuna; you get the idea. Add that to the skillet at the last so it warms up but not much more.

Pour all of this onto an open tortilla on a plate.

If you sprinkle some parmesan cheese on top, now is the time to take a picture. It looks just like a restaurant picture!

Now, if you have too much stuff on the pile; sit down and eat your goodies until you can fold the burrito.

The whole thing takes less than thirty minutes.

Keep the basic build and then add variations. Put your un-used vegetables in baggies for the next day.

Three cloves of garlic might cost a dollar. An onion costs about an dollar. Start doing the math and you’ll realize that you are eating really well for about a dollar and fifty cents a meal taking about ten minutes of prep.