I live on my own, and for years my fridge had the same three residents: half a bag of spinach turning to soup, half an onion in clingfilm, and a pot of crème fraîche I’d opened for one recipe. Cooking for one, the waste isn’t really leftovers. It’s packs. Supermarkets sell for families, so most of what you bin is the bit of the pack you never had a plan for.
The average person in the UK throws away about £250 of food a year, according to WRAP. Here’s what actually cut mine down, most useful first.
1. Plan the pack, not just the dinner
The one habit that matters more than the rest. When you plan Monday’s dinner, look at what it opens and give the rest of that pack a job later in the week.
A 500g pack of beef mince is a good example. Beef tacos on Monday use 150g. Moroccan-style kefta on Wednesday and Pakistani-style chapli kebabs on Friday use most of the rest. That’s one pack, three different dinners, and nothing at the back of the fridge going grey. (More for the rest of a pack of mince.)
Every recipe on Solo Supper ends with “Use up the rest”: the dinners that finish what it leaves over. The free planner adds them to your week. Pro does the whole week for you, picking dinners that share their packs, but you don’t need it to do this by hand.
2. Watch the herbs and the bags of leaves
Herbs and salad leaves were where most of my waste was. A 30g pack of coriander is two or three dinners’ worth, and it lasts about four days. Spinach is worse: a big bag for one handful.
Two tricks. Buy them for the start of the week, not the end, so there’s time to use them up. And before you buy, check you’ve got two more dinners that want them: leftover coriander, spinach.
3. How long does half a tin keep?
Half a tin is a plan, not a leftover. Half a tin of chickpeas or chopped tomatoes keeps two or three days in a covered tub in the fridge (never in the tin). That’s enough time for a second dinner if you choose it now, not on Thursday: half a tin of chickpeas, chopped tomatoes.
4. Freeze on the day you open it
Meat, bread and grated cheese freeze well in single portions. The trick is doing it the day you open the pack, not the day before it turns. A 500g pack of chicken thighs is two or three dinners for one: cook one, freeze the rest flat in a bag, and it thaws overnight in the fridge.
5. Are use-by and best-before the same thing?
No. “Use by” is about safety: don’t eat it after the date. “Best before” is about quality: after the date it may be past its best, but it’s usually fine, so trust your eyes and nose (Food Standards Agency). Plenty of good yoghurt gets binned on the wrong one.
6. Cook from recipes written for one
Halving a recipe for four sounds easy until it says one egg, or a tin, or 45 minutes in a big dish. A recipe written for one gets the amounts, the pan size and the timings right, so you don’t end up making two portions and eating the second one on Tuesday out of guilt.
That’s what Solo Supper is: 456 dinners written for one person, and they get better because people cook them and tell me what’s wrong. A friend’s dhal took 25 minutes, not 12, so the recipe changed. Another found a whole tin of pigeon peas was too much for one and the pan ran dry, so it’s half a tin now.
7. One “use it up” night a week
Pick one night, usually Thursday or Friday, for whatever’s left. Rice, an egg, a handful of veg and something to season it covers most of it. Or put what’s in your fridge into Use it up and pick a dinner that finishes it.
The short version
Plan the pack, not just the dinner. Buy the perishable stuff early in the week. Freeze on the day you open it. And cook from recipes made for one, so the amounts are right in the first place.
If you’d like a hand with the planning part, the planner and the shopping list are free.
Neil