Living by yourself cooking

Hey all, going to be living in an apartment next year and I won't have a foodcourt, so I'm wondering what suggestions everyone has for eating every night. I lived in an apartment this summer and I ended up eating Ham and cheese bagels with maccaroni and cheese and oatmeal every night. hahahaha, while it did taste pretty good, I think I can do better than that. So anyways, fire away any suggestions!

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Well, I usually eat boiled Rice. I love rice with Butter and sugar. I can eat it any time.

It's cheap and filling. And just so I don't get completely bored with it, I firy the rice wth ham and eggs.

It's simple and filling, but I guess you'd have to be a person who can tolerate rice over and over again ^_^;

Most amazing jew boots

If you can get one, a crockpot (slow cooker) can be a great way to have a nice hot home-prepared meal without a lot of preparation fuss. Plenty of slow cooker recipes take little time to prepare, and they they just sit in the cooker for six to eight hours. Its great if you work all day or have classes. Make-ahead recipes that you can put together and refrigerate until you are ready to just pop it in the oven are the same-deal.

Chicken breasts cook up fast, and there are many, many, many ways to season them. Lasagna just gets better as a leftover, and you can put it together ahead of time.

Keep a decent stock of frozen and canned veggies. Preparing them involves little more than a bit of heat over the stove (unless you want to get fancy). Also keep broths (chicken and beef) on hand; putting together your own soups is pretty easy.

Single-pot recipes. Complete meal, only one pot to clean up afterwards. Need I say more?

Start building your own little recipe book. It takes some effort to copy down recipes from different sources, but its very nice to have one place to go to where you know you will find something you can make quickly that you will like.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

GET A RICE COOKER. they have 3 cups rice cookers these days for like 10 bux.
its a essential... so easy to make, just put in rice and turn it on... and such a staple food.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

If you can marinate some meat, I suggest doing that the night before and then cook it when you're ready to eat. Pasta is also very simple and quick to make, and it's easy to add some garlic bread if you're into that.

I was speaking idiomatically.

I am going to tell you right now, the George Foreman Grill is your new best friend.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Some easy stuff that I like to do include:

Rice and rice cooker.
Always keep a stash of chicken wings/nuggets.
George Foreman is your friend, indeed. Hot dogs, burger meat, and buns must stay in stock.
Ground beef is universal. Add some Hamburger Helper, for example. 20 minutes: good stuff.
Spam, macaroni & cheese, ramen, vienna sausages, etc. are okay once in a while as go-tos.

But, as mentioned before, the rice is so necessary.

FELIPE NO

Fried eggs are quick and easy to make, a little oil, bring it to a simmer and break in the egg. After that just watch the egg white and yolk when they're both solid and the outer fringes of the egg are little brown'n crispy the egg's ready to come out.

There are a ton of things out there that are easy and quick to make like grilled cheese sandwiches. Pasteries are also nice because they're relatively easy to make (whip up the batter, set oven preferences, throw in the batter and wait).

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Try soy sauced eggs, so good. Just fry an egg as usual per Yggdrasil's instructions but scramble it first and add some soy sauce in the middle of cooking while the egg's middle is still raw. Creates a totally different animal.

If you want decently good food for you, fish is quite easy to deal with. Just buy a single sized portion of salmon or tilapia, whatever fish you like and cover it in flour (1st), beaten egg (2nd), breadcrumbs (3). Sear both sides in a pan and finish it off in an oven 325 for 5 minutes.

I live by myself too and my mom always calls to insist I eat at least one serving of fish a week. So do it.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

-Some things I make for myself-

Olivieri Pasta(but ALWAYS with an improvised sauce, can't stand packaged sauce)
Scrambled eggs with lots of spices cooked in
Egg sandwiches(toast with mayo and ketchup, and cook an egg in a bowl in the microwave, it's great)
Egg foo yung(sp?)It's great, and not that hard to make
Hotdogs(always a cheap, easy idea, if you get bored of them, add some red pepper jelly, makes it amazing!)
etc...\

Hope that helps.........................

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Hehe, so many people mentioned the rice cooker.
All you need is that, a skillet, some meats, and seasonings.

Add different meat/sauce/fillings over rice every night and you'll never get bored.

Also those packaged ramen noodles are the staple of the college diet, although people claim the seasoning gives you cancer. It probably does, but it's still good with different soup bases and veggies.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

It took me a while to get adjusted to this type of living that everyone is describing. I came from a family where my parents cooked pretty much every night and we had the meat, the veggie, the starch, and the bread on pretty much every meal that wasn't pasta. And anyone who has lived alone knows that it is quite hard to make that kind of a meal for one person without having a shitload of leftovers.

My main staple when I lived alone was pasta. It's easy, doesn't require much cleanup, and it is taylor made to portion control.

I had the Foreman, but I found that I'd never want to eat enough chicken or ground beef in a small enough time frame to use it very often.

And I absolutely agree with anyone who says rice is good.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

I cook Chicken Burgers, Grilled Cheese, Soup, Pizza, Many vegetables to keep up with metabolism.

How ya doing, buddy?

Cooking really is not very hard or time-consuming. You should try different things to see where you're good at.

Pasta is always an easy option. About 100-125g (fourth of those standard size pasta packs) is one portion. Making a sauce is really easy. All kinds of tomato-based sauces are amongst the easiest. You can buy ready-made sauce and add stuff in it, or buy a can chopped tomatoes (will probably work out cheaper) and add some herbs. Mixed herbs and basil go well with all kinds of tomato dishes. You can brown mince in a pan with some oil, and then add the tomato sauce and herbs. You can also use fish (tuna in a can works) or mixed vegetables.

Potatoes are cheap. In my country they cost about 1 euro per 2 kilos or whatever. If you don't like boiled potatoes, potatoes are very versatile. Try mash, jacket potatoes, fried potatoes, garlic potatoes, chips (french fries)...

Chicken and fish are cheaper than red meat, but with no less nutritional value. Turkey is sometimes cheaper than chicken and be used in pretty much the same way. If you have a freezer, it can be very cheap to buy a whole fish and skin it yourself, put into little pieces and save for later use.

Depending on what kind of kitchen appliences you have, milk shakes and smoothies are really easy to make depending on your taste. You can make them more or less healthy and they are really quick too. Add ice cream/milk/yoghurt/juice, berries, banana, fruit, chocolate sauce... However you like it.

If you don't feel like you are really that good at cooking yet, ready-made sauces can help a lot. If you like indian food, you can buy a pot of curry sauce, fry some chicken, add the sauce, stir a bit, boil some rice to go with it, and you're done.

Pizza is really easy to make yourself! Try it! It's hard to mess up. You can get it just like you like it, though getting all the ingredients can be surprisingly expensive.

Few other tips

Many people have mentioned a 'rice boiler'. I don't think I have ever seen one, but if you have a normal water boiler (for making tea or whatever), it's much faster to boil the water in that and then add it to the pan on the hub.

Frozen is usually cheaper than refridgerated stuff in the supermarket. Frozen pizzas, cod fillets, pot pies... Seem to be cheaper as frozen goods. Frozen goods are usually better as well!

Don't be fooled by 'seemingly' low prices. Look for the price per 100g or whatever unit they use in your country. Noodles, for example, can be really expensive, as well as tuna, if you really compare how much of other stuff you could get for that price if you were to buy 100g.

Buying bulk is cheaper, if you have anywhere to store it. Stuff like rice and pasta stays good for a long time, as well as canned food. Exploit special offers.

Vegetables and fruits are cheaper if you pick them individually rather than buy a bag of them. The price difference is often double!

Store chains usually have their own private labels that are significantly cheaper than the brand name products. However, don't think that the brand names are always automatically better. A lot of the time there is little or no difference. A supermaket's own ketchup will probably taste much the same as genuine bottle of Heinz for just a third of the price.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

You can get one of those table grills, they cook alot of different meats very will and they drain alot of the fat, even bacon gets a little healthey in it.

Pasta is also a good option, just boil spagetti or laguini noodles and add stuff you like to it, from tomato sauce to your fave veggies! Can't go wrong with noodles will all the combinations.

FELIPE NO

I am in the same boat. I just finished eating some egg salad sandwiches (just hard boiled eggs mashed with some mayo) ...soo good.

I will often make a large portion of chili and then just refrigerate or freeze what I don't eat. It will last awhile.

I don't have a rice cooker, maybe I should try that.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

If you are a lazy bastard like me, I'd recommend getting a Pizzazz Pizza Oven.

You can pretty much cook anything on these... for example the stuff I cook on it on a daily basis:

Chicken Nuggets,
Popcorn Chicken,
Mozzerella Sticks,
Corn Dogs,
Mini Corn Dogs,
those Taquito things,
...and Pizza of course.

These are just the things I cook on it. Can probably cook countless other frozen foods on it as well.

Jam it back in, in the dark.