Table for one: How do you eat when you're alone?
Posted
Sep 05 2008, 12:33 PM
by
Donna Freedman
Rating:
Comedian Elayne Boosler once joked that she planned to open a restaurant just for single people. Instead of tables, it would have a bunch of kitchen sinks over which customers would stand and dine.
Nine nights out of 10, I eat regular meals at my dining table. While it's true they are often one-pot-glop meals, I eat them from a plate or bowl, not from the pan. I even use cloth napkins -- at six for a quarter from a rummage sale, they're both cheap and eco-friendly.
Some nights, though, I don't eat. I just pick.
Last night the smell of homemade jam in my kitchen distracted me from the chicken leg quarters in the fridge. I spread a little cream cheese on a couple of crackers and added a dollop of fresh plum jam -- an appetizer, I thought. But they tasted so good I made a whole plate of them. Then I ate a couple of local peaches. Their sweetness made me crave salinity, so I sliced a tomato and sprinkled it with kosher salt from the dollar store. With a glass of iced tea, that was my dinner.
Picking, grazing, nibbling -- not always the healthiest way to eat. But sometimes it's OK. Especially when it's not a bag of Doritos and a Diet Coke.
In praise of the graze
Come on, admit it: A big perk of singledom is eating what you want, when you want. There's no hungry kid to feed, no disbelieving partner to say, "Is that what you're having for dinner?"
I'm more likely to pick at food in the summer, when warm temperatures preclude a hot meal and farmers markets are offering local produce. But winter evenings sometimes call for simple, soothing fare too.
Stuff like:
• Crackers, cheese and fruit: See above.
• Bread, eggs and tea: Spread some real butter on French bread and eat it with a couple of warm hard-boiled eggs sprinkled with kosher salt and pepper. Satisfying and cheap: I do this when eggs are on sale, use butter I've bought at loss-leader prices and stashed in the freezer, and cash in free French bread coupons that I got by answering quick customer surveys from Albertsons.
• Hot cereal: On a raw winter evening, try a bowl of oatmeal (I add dried cranberries and sliced almonds) or Cream of Wheat. Or cornmeal mush, which you can call "polenta" if that makes you feel more worldly. (Look for polenta recipe variations on the Internet. I like adding frozen corn kernels and a bit of grated cheddar.)
• Rice and milk: My grandparents used to eat this for supper, and I've been doing it myself lately. Heat up leftover rice or take 15 minutes to cook some. I add a little brown sugar and a dash of cinnamon.
• Stir-fry: If you don't want to eat that leftover rice with milk, sauté it briefly with whatever veggies you have on hand (frozen ones will do), slivers of leftover meat or tofu if you like, and some kind of sauce (I've used soy, sweet chili and even Worcestershire). Sometimes I eat a dish that I call Pitiful Rice: Melt a spoon of bacon drippings in my cast iron skillet, grate in a carrot (the only vegetable I always have on hand), cook until the carrot is soft and dump rice on top of that. Maybe not the most nutritious stir-fry ever, but the rice turns a pretty color from the carrot juice.
• Scrambled-egg sandwiches: On-sale eggs, toast made from "used bread" -- really cheap, really easy. Variation: Add a little bit of dill weed to the eggs and pull a bagel out of the freezer.
• Canned black beans: Drain and rinse, then heat up with salsa. I used to top them with grated Monterey jack cheese. Lately I've been spreading a bit of soft cream cheese (it goes on sale regularly for 99 cents at Walgreens) onto a tortilla from the used-bread store (79 cents for a 20-ounce bag), dumping the beans and salsa on top, and folding it into an awkward burrito. You actually might want to eat this one over the sink.
'Little meals for one'
No-fuss meals can add up to decent savings. In a post called "Cheap supper night: Hacking one meal a week to save money," partner blogger Trent Hamm of The Simple Dollar noted that one cheap supper out of seven could save his family more than $300 a year.
"If I choose to replace a meal eaten out with an ultra-cheap meal, the savings are far, far greater," Hamm writes.
Jaime over at the Cheap Healthy Good personal-finance blog grazes as a way of life. "I am not a breakfast-lunch-dinner sort of girl. Several small meals is much more my MO," she wrote in a post called "City kitchen chronicles: Little meals for one."
She survives on simple fare like eggs, cottage cheese, greens, stir-fries, sandwiches and the famous "peanut butter spoon." Jaime gets beet greens for free at farmers markets, since some customers only want the beetroot.
Some nights you don't feel like cooking, or you're just not that hungry. On these occasions, why not give yourself permission to graze? It's certainly cheaper than ordering takeout because you think you need a full meal every single night. You don't.
And it's not as though I don't ever eat real meals. Tonight I had one of those chicken leg quarters, along with a baked potato and steamed corn, and another of those peaches for dessert. Repasts like this more than make up for nights when I eat Pitiful Rice. Or a bag of Doritos and a Diet Coke.
