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Meal planning for one? You’ll love the easy weekly meal plans found in our Meal Planning For One series. This is the forth post of the meal planning for one series. You will find dinner ideas for the week including single-serving recipes, grocery lists and cooking tips. Perfect for anyone cooking for one, caregivers, and empty nesters.
Welcome to week 4 of our new Meal Planning For One – Cooking For One Meal Plan. We have received a lot of great feedback from our single serving Meal Plans and hope you enjoy the recipes we have featured in this week 4 installment.
Meal Planning For One
These meal plans are ideal for anyone cooking for one or two people and are designed for people who live on their own, a parent who wants to indulge themselves while their kids have their favorites, couples that can’t agree on what they want for dinner or caregivers providing meals to a parent or friend.
Single Serving Meal Plans
A person cooking for only themselves may often find that it isn’t always easy to reduce a recipe. The thought of doing that every day or deciding what to cook each evening for dinner, without repetition can be a daunting task. We hope to take some of the pressure off with this “Cooking For One Meal Plan”.
Along with the meal plan, you will also find a grocery list (see link at the bottom of this page to download the grocery list – pdf document) which will include all of the ingredients you will need to make the 5 or more recipes each week.
If you choose not to make all of the recipes on the meal plan, no worries. Just cross those items off of your grocery list.
These plans are designed for people who live on their own, a parent who wants to indulge themselves while their kids have their favorites, couples that can’t agree on what they want for dinner or caregivers providing meals to a parent or friend.
Meal Plan
Beef Stew For One
Twice Baked Eggplant
Crustless Asparagus Quiche For One
Sheet Pan Salmon for One
Small Batch Turkey Meatballs
Bonus Recipe
Small Batch Butter Pecan Granola
Tips for the week…
If you’d like, only purchase one type of cheese for the recipes this week. Fontina cheese is recommended in Wednesday’s Crustless Quiche recipe, however you can easily use shredded Cheddar cheese instead. You will already be using the shredded Cheddar in the Twice Baked Eggplant.
You will be using asparagus in two recipes this week, one standard sized “bunch” of asparagus as sold in most stores will be enough for both recipes. If you aren’t a fan of asparagus, you can use broccoli or cauliflower instead.
Be sure to see if your grocery has a “bulk bin” aisle. This is a great place to buy your spices as you need them for pennies. You buy exactly the amount you need and avoid buying a large jar.
General Meal Planning Tips…
Before you head to the store, look through your refrigerator and pantry. Take stock of what you already have so you don’t purchase the same item again.
Dried or canned beans, dried lentils and rice keep for a very long time. Consider purchasing extra cans of beans or larger, often less expensive bags of rice to have on hand when you want to put a meal together quickly.
Instead of buying pre-packaged meat, cheese or seafood, buy from the deli, meat or seafood counters. Ask to purchase the amount you need. If meat or seafood only comes in large packs, you can usually take it to the meat or seafood counter and ask them to repackage it into a smaller amount.
You can use any extra cheese you have for snacking, on sandwiches, shredded over scrambled eggs, cubed in salads or stirred into pasta.
If your store has bulk bins, purchase your grains, pasta, nuts and spices from them. This way you only buy the amount you need for the week.
Make weekends your “Use It Up Weekend”. Try to use up all of the produce you might have leftover from other meals you made during the week. A Veggie Scramble is a great meal for breakfast or add any extra vegetables to soups or pasta.
Visit the salad bars at grocery stores to buy small amounts of the ingredients you might need.
If you have any other suggestions to make cooking for one easier, please leave them below.
Enjoy!
Just in general I’d like to mention that I only use my toaster oven for all these delightful recipes. So please make accomodations for that vs firing up an oven especially in the summertime.