Cooking for One

I improvised a pear crisp today out of three pears, some oatmeal, butter, brown sugar, and a bit of cinnamon. It was pretty good, despite the fact that I didn’t use a recipe or measure anything. Good enough that I decided to make it my dinner.

Cooking for one is a rather motley and scattershot activity. When no one else is eating your meals, you can feel free to eat whatever strange (or easy) food strikes your fancy. Like pear crisp for dinner. Or beans from a can heated in the microwave. Or the egg and broccoli and black beans and tomato scramble thing I made yesterday because that was what I had in the fridge (the eggs turned kind of gray from the black beans, but it actually tasted fine).

It’s not that I don’t know how to cook. I do. At least, well enough not to totally embarrass myself in the kitchen. But sometimes I don’t always feel like putting in much effort or buying those non-essential things at the grocery store that would afford me a little more creativity. Maybe I’m just being lazy. Or cheap. I’ve definitely been accused of that one.

Living on my own again, I feel a little like I’m back in my college days, when I was on a ten-meal-a-week plan at the cafeteria and had about 15 additional dollars to spend on food. I was pretty good then at tracking down free meals---being on a sports team helped. But my non-cafeteria diet still consisted mainly of oatmeal, cheap wheat bread, peanut butter, and whatever cereal I stole from my parents’ house when I was home on break. I have a little more money than that to spend now, thank God, because I’ve only recently been able to bring myself to eat oatmeal again.

Still, it’s hard to summon up the motivation to make anything fancy when I know I’m the only one who is going to be eating it. And I sort of like having the freedom to make weird things and not have to subject anyone else to the risk or the malnutrition. Like improvised pear crisp for dinner.