Meals for one…depending on who you talk to that can either be liberating or depressing. But the reality is that many of us are in the position of cooking for one. In my case, I suddenly went from a family of 4 to a house of one after my wife passed away and both of my sons went off to college (URI and ASU by-the-way). We had always been a family that cooked and ate together and I had no desire to become a “fast food” regular or have a freezer full of lean cuisine dinners.
So driving to work I got to thinking (I do that a lot since I live in Rhode Island and drive to Boston to work) about what to do about dinner now that my last son had left to go to college. I’ve always enjoyed cooking, but it’s a challenge when you come home from work late and are tired from a long commute. And since we don’t even have a microwave in the house (zapping food with radiation doesn’t pass as cooking in my house!) quick, tasty and healthy meals can be a challenge. As I went over the recipe’s I’d been cooking over the summer I realized that I’d need to size them down again to a single serving and that I’d need more variety. Then it hit me, if I was going to redo all my recipes, why not put them up on a blog? Why stop there, maybe a cook book was lurking under all that work?
So a project was born. I decided that Dinner for One was a catchy title, only to discover that indeed it was, and it was a movie and a major tradition in Germany. So a few weeks of googleing and talking to my sons (one who insisted I had to get a domain registered ASAP) I decided on Meals for One, set up another wordpress blog and started cooking. Back to that domain name thing, turns out someone had just let the meals4one.com domain expire, so I grabbed it.
My goal is to cook two to three new meals a week and publish the recipes and pictures on my blog. With any luck in a year I’ll have over a hundred Meals for One recipes!
The other thing you’ll notice about the blog is that the recipes span a wide range of countries. Over the summer I had gotten into the habit of doing a different cuisine every night to avoid getting stuck in a rut. And since I’m originally from the Gulf Coast (seafood & southern comfort food), grew up in Detroit (lets add some polish food to the mix), live in New England (more seafood) and have a fondness for spicy food (toss in Mexican, Indian & Thai) this will be a rather eclectic mix of recipes.
So please take a look at the recipe’s, drop me a line with your favorite meals, and please let me know if the recipe doesn’t work. I promise that these won’t be in the Southern church cookbook tradition where the cook always left one ingredient out so that you could never show her up!
Enjoy,
-randy
