A friend of mine asked for tips on how I handled meal planning and cooking while living on my own, and I wrote up a goddamn wall of text. Posting it here in case it could help someone here. Take what works, and toss away the rest.
-
Meal planning: I find planning for one week at a time was working best for me. A weeks worth of groceries is something I could reasonably carry in little trolly bag thing and my backpack. I didn't overbuy produce, and it was less likely to rot before I went to the store next. I would sit down and draw a simple 7x2 table - lunch and dinner for the next seven days. Breakfast was lumped into one or two things, since whatever I bought would last me nearly a week. Often time lunch was last night's leftovers, with a few breaks in-between. Dinners would be one or two "high effort" meals, and the rest either one pan deals or something equally easy.
-
Writing it out this way also helps me figure out connections between ingredients. For example "Hey two of these recipes use ground beef, maybe I can cut the recipe in half" or "Three recipes need onions, so I might as well get the bag." Like the matrix, you'll start to see not lines of code, but how obsessed you are with sausage-based meals.
-
You can do the big meal prep if you want, with the whole pre-portioned containers and all, but honestly that always fails me because I get leftover fatigue so easily. If you're okay with a week of leftovers, the internet has a lot of recipes for this sort of thing.
-
Cooking full meals for yourself every night is an unreasonable expectation. Most times I aimed for one or two nice meals, ate leftovers of that for a few days (and there will be days worth). I'll pick a recipe from serious eats or the kitchn, but there are a ton of recipe sites out there. Kenji Lopez-Alt recipes are super good because he often takes the time to explain why a recipe is the way that it is, and how the processes work. The Food Lab is a gold standard cookbook for this sort of thing! Check out your local library for cookbooks (they have digital copies too!), or find one off the back of a truck at https://libgen.rs/
-
So if you only do one or two big meals a week, what are the other nights? Quick and easy stuff, like one pan meals or even packaged meals. Trader Joe's gets a lot of shit (some of it for good goddamn reasons), but they do have some delicious single serve meals. No matter what, any food is better than no food. The nice thing about eating alone is you'll get to know how hungry you really are, and what you really need and want. For me, if I'm not eating leftovers, I'm often eating sides. Roasting up an entire pan of asparagus and a simple turkey sandwich to round things out.
-
Not a single goddamn thing is packaged for single people, and it will be the bane of your existence. If you want to cut a recipes in half, make sure to split the meat products right when you get home from the store (so split hamburger into two packages). It's impossible to split them after freezing. A lot of times I would freeze one half a loaf of bread, because the other half would always mold before I got to it. Because you also have ADHD, I would recommend having a little list on the fridge on what is in the freezer - things cease to exist when the door is closed. You can use that list to help you meal plan for the next week!
-
If you're on an extremely limited budget, try to find a grocery store that does orders for pick-up. You'll know exactly how much you're spending, have a harder time making impulse purchases that are hard to see, and picking up often means the service is free.
-
The internet is unstable as fuck, and you'll never be able to find that recipe again. I recommend an app called Paprika - one time purchase, and it scrapes the website for the relevant information and puts it on your phone. You can even scrape a website that throws up a paywall - eat shit NYT cooking section! The nice thing is over time you'll build up a library of loved recipes, which is great for when you're feeling fatigued and just need to have something. If not the app, at least pull a pdf copy of the website.
-
"Souper cubes" (or their cheaper knockoffs) fucking rule. You can make up a huge batch of soup or curry, and then freeze them in these 1-2cup portion cubes. Pop them out into a big ziploc bag, reheat when tired and hungry. I've also done a big pot of red sauce, and then froze cubes of sauce. https://www.amazon.com/Souper-Cubes-Extra-Large-Silicone-Freezing/dp/B07GSSSTY9
-
Get a rice cooker if you don't have one. Even at your most dysfunctional and bad days, you can make yourself a nice pot of perfectly cooked rice, and even steam some veggies or dumplings. It's a lifesaver.
-
Depending on how cash flush you are, plan on having at least one takeout meal. Right now I'm at my most money tight, but I still try to sneak in some fast food or a pizza once a month. You're going to want it, and it's a cultural thing that sucks to miss out on. It's easier to hold off on impulse meals when you can say "I just need to wait until Friday, I'll be going out with friends for a beer that night." Plus, cooking alone means you're cleaning up alone, and some nights that's just too much. Give yourself some grace to order a burger every once in a while.
Remember, all of this is a journey, so if some weeks you don't cook as much or even at all, that's okay. Meal planning, cooking, food management - all of them are skills to be learned. Again, fed is best, for both babies and you.
