Plenty of people come to cooking for one late. A partner dies, a marriage ends, or a husband or wife moves into care, and suddenly the recipes, the shopping habits and the size of every pan are wrong for the number of people at the table. About 8.6 million people in the UK live on their own, and just under half of them are 65 or over, according to the ONS.
I’ve lived on my own for years, so I can’t tell you what it’s like to lose the person you cooked for. I can help with the practical side, which is what this site is for: shopping for one, cooking for one, and not throwing half of it away.
Why does cooking for one feel harder than cooking for two?
Because the food isn’t sold for one. Two of everything divides neatly; one doesn’t. A pack of two pork chops, four chicken thighs, a 500g bag of carrots: cook for two and it comes out even, cook for one and there’s always something in the fridge waiting for a plan. I counted this across every recipe on the site, and one dinner for one leaves about two thirds of its fresh packs unused.
The other part is that the effort is all yours, and so is the audience. When nobody else is eating, toast starts to look like a reasonable dinner. Some nights it is. As a habit it wears thin.
How do you shop for one?
Plan the week before you shop, and plan by the pack rather than by the dinner. If Monday opens a bag of spinach, something later in the week finishes it. A few habits help:
- Buy loose. Two carrots, one onion and three potatoes from the loose shelves, instead of a bag of each.
- Use the counters. The butcher and fish counters will sell you one chop or one fillet without a second look.
- Split packs the day you shop. Sausages and chicken thighs freeze well in ones and twos, flat in a bag, and thaw overnight in the fridge.
- Keep a short list of staples. Stock cubes, tinned tomatoes, rice, pasta and frozen peas, so the weekly shop is only the fresh things.
That first habit is the one the planner here is built around. It shows what each dinner opens and what’s left, and Pro, if you want it, picks weeks where the dinners share their packs.
What are easy meals for one to start with?
Start with what you already know, made smaller. Most people cooking for one again can cook; it’s the quantities that are off. These are plain, familiar dinners, each written for one person:
- Pork chop with apple and mustard sauce (17 minutes). One chop, one apple, a pan sauce.
- Cottage pie (32 minutes). In a single dish, so there’s no half a pie in the fridge for three days.
- Sausage and butter bean cassoulet (29 minutes). Two sausages and half a tin of beans, all in one pan.
- Baked salmon with dill sauce (22 minutes). One fillet from the fish counter.
- Spanish tortilla (28 minutes). Eggs, a potato and an onion, for the nights the fridge is bare.
Everything on the site is in grams and UK pack sizes, written for one from the start, so you’re never dividing a recipe for four and guessing at a quarter of an egg.
Is it worth cooking a proper meal just for yourself?
Yes. A hot dinner at the table is a decent part of the day, and it costs less than you’d think: the cheap week on this site is seven dinners for about £16.
Small things make it feel like a meal rather than refuelling. Use a proper plate. Sit at the table, or at least not in front of the washing up. Cook the dish you used to make for two, at the size for one. It still tastes like it did.
What about when someone comes round?
Cook for two that night. In the planner, open that day’s dinner and change “Cooking for this day” to 2; the recipe and the shopping list double for that dinner only, and the rest of the week stays at one.
Can I have the week on paper?
Yes. In the planner, choose More, then Print this week. You get one page with the week’s dinners and the shopping list, with a box to tick for each item, for the fridge door or the shopping bag. The recipes, planner, shopping list and printing are free, with no account needed.
If it’s the company you miss more than the cooking, that’s bigger than anything a recipe can fix, and worth talking to someone about. Age UK has free advice and local groups, and you don’t need to be old to ring them about someone who is.
But do cook. One plate, done properly, is still worth the pan.
Neil