A Toolkit for Solo Cooking - Bee Wilson 🌞

[justaprogressive]

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 or
individual shepherd’s pies.


— Lots of small containers for freezing one portion of the universal
sauces 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! Everyday is a great day to cook!