A Toolkit for Solo Cooking - Bee Wilson 🌞 [View all]

A toolkit for solo cooking

When cooking for one, everything can be slightly different, and that
includes kitchen equipment. You can’t put ingredients for a solo casserole
into a pot designed to feed six. Having said this, many of the tools you need
will be exactly the same as when cooking for a crowd. You still need a
sharp knife you can rely on, a chopping board, a few trusty wooden spoons
and silicone spatulas, a wok, a box grater, an immersion blender, some
tongs. And a spider strainer will be more useful than ever when cooking for
one because the quantities will be smaller, so it makes even more sense to
scoop pasta or vegetables from the water with a small strainer instead of
bothering with a colander. But some of the extras I find especially helpful
when alone in the kitchen are:

— A blini pan – I bought two of these after reading How to Eat by Nigella
Lawson more than twenty years ago. I have hardly ever made blinis but I
use the pans constantly for toasting nuts and spices and frying single eggs.

— A small ovenproof casserole dish that you can brown stuff in and then
braise it, either in the oven or on the hob. These are never cheap (unless you
can find one second-hand) but pay for themselves over the years.

— A small saucepan for making things like béchamel.

— A few one-person pie dishes for making small soufflés (see page 302) or
individual shepherd’s pies.

— Lots of small containers for freezing one portion of the universal sauces
(see page 243). I save plastic takeaway boxes and Greek yoghurt pots with
lids and use those.

— Freezer bags and brown paper bags for freezing things like bread (I try
to keep good sliced sourdough in the freezer and toast it straight from
frozen).



Using things up

When I spoke to friends who cooked alone about which ingredients they
found hardest to use up, they all – to a man or woman – said the same thing:
dairy products (especially cream) and fragile vegetables and herbs. So it
makes sense to have a few delicious strategies for dealing with these.
Everything I’ve said so far in the book about substituting ingredients is
even more important when cooking for one. Use what you have, not what
you think you ought to have. But with the best will in the world, when you
are just one person, it can still be tricky to use up a whole tub of double
cream before it starts to sour or a big bag of spinach or kale. Here are a few
ideas that have helped me and that I hope will help you too:

— Instant congee. Take leftover rice and blend it with twice the volume of
water or chicken stock. Simmer for 5 minutes, or until porridge-like, then
season well and serve with grated ginger, soy sauce, sesame oil and perhaps
a soft-boiled egg, some greens or a handful of shredded roasted chicken.

— Any-greens pesto. This is a good use for any oddments of both salad
vegetables and herbs. Blitz the greens and herbs with a generous amount of
olive oil, salt, a peeled clove of garlic, a handful of nuts. Taste and add a
handful of any cheese you have in the fridge, grated. You can store this in a
jar in the fridge for up to 5 days.

— Cook your salad. Lettuce and other salad greens such as rocket or
radicchio are just as delicious cooked as they are raw. Shred them and wilt
them into a risotto or add them to a soup.

— Make hard-to-use-up quantities of root vegetables, cabbage and kale into
little side salads. Almost any vegetable can be turned into a ‘slaw’:
shredded or grated and combined with lemon juice, salt and herbs. It always
tastes better if you can leave it to sit for at least 5 minutes before adding
olive oil to taste and perhaps some dried fruit or nuts.

— Freeze herbs. You can either freeze them whole or finely chop them and
freeze them in ice cube trays, topped with a thin layer of olive oil. Turn the
cubes out into a freezer box and label carefully. These little herb cubes can
be dropped, without defrosting, into a soup or stew or pasta sauce or dish of
vegetables for added flavour.

— Use leftover dairy or coconut milk in your baking. Old milk? Make
pancakes (for crêpe batter, blitz 270ml milk with 110g plain flour, 2 eggs
and a pinch of salt) or porridge. Old yoghurt? Make cake (swapping it for
maybe a third of the butter, which will also give you a healthier cake). Old
cream or mascarpone? Make scones or American biscuits. By the way,
when I say ‘old’, I mean cream that is a day or so past its best, not actually
green with mould.

— Give double cream a second life as a luscious fruit ice cream. The added
bonus is you also get to use up some over-ripe fruit (another easy-to-waste
food). Whip however much cream you have left. Make a fruit purée by
blitzing over-ripe fruit with icing sugar to taste. Combine the fruit and the
cream and freeze in a lidded container for 4–5 hours or until frozen. Last
time I made this with green grapes and the juice and zest of a leftover lime:
a revelation.

From "The Secret of Cooking"
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77264998-the-secret-of-cooking

Thanks Bee!