Cookbook for One (or two)

[bbro]

I asked this on my diet message board, but they are all idiots and just said things like "halve regular recipes", "Cooking Light is awesome!!!", and about cutting cooking for two recipes in half.

Obviously, not the what I am looking for, so I decided to turn to you guys for help.

Does anyone know of a good cookbook for one or two? I have a million cookbooks, but if I am eating alone, I don't want to make 4 portions or do the math to split it into only 2.

Thanks!

[BigV]

I wish I could help.

Cooking in small quantities is not an area in which I have great skill. I was recently chided in the what's cooking thread about my tomato soup recipe that makes a couple gallons of soup.

I come by it honestly, though. True story: one Thanksgiving when Tink and I had been married only a short while, we enjoyed the holiday feast at my parents' house. It was delicious, as my Mom and (especially) my Dad, were great cooks. Tink complimented my Dad on the stuffing, and she asked him for his recipe. He said ok, and when it arrived in the mail (we had flown home by then) we got a good laugh from the title of the recipe, hand written on the top of a steno page "Stuffing for 100".

I don't know many things to cook, beyond the simplest and most basic dishes, that work for One or Two. One steak. Ok. One sandwich. One baked potato. One omelet. I'm scratchin my head here... all these small scale dishes seem like food that is merely assembled. That's not bad, I've had some delicious meals this way. But when I'm cooking something... making a new thing from ingredients, I find it is much much easier if the quantities are larger, at least a little bit.

Take spaghetti, for example. I find it much more difficult to precisely measure out just one serving of noodles, just enough water and salt and oil in the proper proportions to cook the noodles... Wait!

That's it. That's what's hard for me. Sometimes the ingredients in a normal sized dish, say for four, are in such small quantities that to get a proportionally smaller portion is very difficult. What is a "quarter of a pinch of salt" anyway? And the margin for error is much smaller. Everything will cook, be done, and burn faster. Great.

For me, it's easier to cook what I like, eat the quantity I like, and ignore, freeze, refrigerate, throw away, feed to the dogs, or whatever, the rest than it is to find a recipe that has really easy math for my end quantity with no leftovers that still tastes good.

You know something else? As I type this, I realize that there *is* one area where I do consider leftovers as a potentially major drawback, and that is when I go camping and backpacking. Naturally, refrigeration is problematic on the trail. And there's very little upside to having extra food at the end of the trip (not counting emergency food, of course). So, from this perspective, you may find many options for small dishes, even for one or two, in the backpacking cooking section. But that kind of cooking comes with other considerable restrictions and complications. Complications which, to me, are much more onerous than having to divide by 2.

Cook what you *like to eat*, eat the right amount, and then stop. Do something else with the rest of the food. I'm a member of the clean plate club, and I'm not particularly happy about it. But that is all psychological training, not driven by a particular nutritional need on my part.

Sorry. Told you I couldn't help.

[Flint]

Originally Posted by bbro

I asked this on my diet message board, but they are all idiots and just said things like "halve regular recipes", "Cooking Light is awesome!!!", and about cutting cooking for two recipes in half.

I'm sorry you haven't received any helpful answers yet. This link should have what you're looking for.

[glatt]

We have a cookbook that we got in the mid 90s called "cooking for two." It was put out by Cooking Light magazine. It had some really good recipes in it. They were really scaled for two people, not just by taking a regular recipe and reducing it, but by looking at how ingredients are sold and basing the recipes around that as much as possible. That would reduce the waste associated with leftover ingredients. Like, who wants to buy a can of stewed tomatoes, but only use half?

Wish I had a direct link for you, but I don't. It might be out of print.

If you do an amazon search for "cooking for two" there are a several different hits that get good reviews.

This one looks promising. 22 people cared enough to review it. Most of the others only have one or two review.

[Flint]

:::brushes the dust off the cover:::

OMG this is a Cookbook for One (or two) HUMANS !!!

[Undertoad]

correctly played

[Shawnee123]

great reference, flint!

[bbro]

Thanks for the info glatt. Never even thought about looking at the ingredients for half a can of stuff. I also found a Betty Crocker cookbook with the link you gave me.

Flint, you can't type in 3/4 and divide it in half, I got a huge red screen!

[Undertoad]

Of course he can type in 3/4... he's a drummer.

[Flint]

ha ha ha

I had no idea this was relevant, but here's a diagram.
A 3/4 beat with my feet, and a 4/4 beat with my hands:

[Undertoad]

Have you heard Robyn Hitchcock's Superman? Various instruments in the trio slow down, go completely out of time for a while, or on their own time, and then return to "the" time. Your diagram made me think of it because you could do rhythm for both the "in time" part and the "out of time" part. If you were brilliant.

[Flint]

Haven't heard that. But if they go "slow down" and go "out of time" it might be a metric modulation.

Originally Posted by Steve Smith

On the new record 'Sideways Blues' has this rhythmic illusion that the tempo starts slow and gets fast. But what's really happening is we're playing a twelve bar blues and interestingly if you play a dotted quarter note all the way through it comes out perfectly even. It wouldn't if you played eight bars, but it does in twelve. To me it's no coincidence that this Afro-American song form developed and most naturally fell into twelve bars since it's so African derived. I play a pulse over that dotted quarter note that sounds like a 'sideways shuffle' and then we wrote a melody around that so you think we're in this slow tempo but the actual tempo of the tune is one third faster than it sounds. It's pretty interesting to the ear.

In this song, the instruments play various parts matched to the actual tempo, and the perceived tempo. Causing it to "speed up" and "slow down" ...

[Flint]

Your diagram made me think of it because you could do rhythm for both the "in time" part and the "out of time" part.

The diagram is of the basic form of a solo I play. The feet play every eighth note on double bass pedals, R L L, and the left foot is also on top of the hi-hat pedal. The first hi-hat note is splashed, and the second hi-hat note is closed (see the white area closing inside the black bass dot).

The right hand plays the same value of eighth notes on the ride, and the left punctuates with an appropriate backbeat for a 4/4 pattern.

That's the basic idea. Then I switch to the hands playing in various other time signatures, while the feet always remain in "waltz" time (which, in another way, doesn't sound like a "waltz" because there is a bass note on every eighth). I try to do things with my hands that are difficult to phrase against the constant three pattern. I also try to play melodic patterns across larger and larger subdivisions with my hands to achieve another type of "slowing down" effect.

I plan to break this out at an avant-garde jazz improv, and see who plays the three and who plays the four!