Last Tuesday I pulled a pan of baked ziti out of the oven at 5:45, set it on the stove, and Greg looked at it the way you look at a snowdrift in the driveway. "Who else is coming?" he asked. Nobody. It was the two of us, and that pan was supposed to feed eight.
We ate ziti Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday Greg made himself a grilled cheese at 4 o'clock, which in our house is a quiet form of protest. The rest went in the trash on Sunday, and I wrote it in the green notebook under "waste," a column I started this month because I needed to see it.
Josh moved into his apartment near campus last August. Emily has been gone since 2017. For most of the 25 years we've been in this house I cooked for four, and when the kids were teenagers it felt like cooking for six. Every recipe card in my box, and every recipe I know by heart, is built for that table. My hands still reach for the two-pound package of ground beef without asking me.
What I'm changing at the store
I work at the school until 3:30 and usually stop at Kroger on the way home, which is where the trouble starts. I'm tired, I'm hungry, and the family pack of chicken breasts is $2.49 a pound instead of $3.49. So I buy five pounds, and then I'm cooking five pounds of chicken.
Here's what I've started doing instead, three weeks in:
- I plan four dinners a week, not seven. The other nights are leftovers, eggs, or soup from the freezer.
- When I do buy the family pack, I split it the same night into one-pound bags before it ever sees the fridge shelf.
- I buy produce twice a week in smaller amounts. A whole bag of spinach for two people was going slimy every single time.
- Bread goes in the freezer, and we take out slices as we need them. A $1.89 loaf used to lose its last third to mold.
- Eggs are about $5.99 a dozen right now, so I'm not wasting any of those either.
Cook once, but not the same meal twice
The real problem with the ziti wasn't the amount. It was eating the same thing three nights running. Greg will eat almost anything, but not the same anything on Thursday that he ate on Tuesday.
So I've been trying to cook one big thing and turn the second half into a different dinner. A roast chicken on Sunday becomes chicken tacos on Tuesday with a can of black beans and a few tortillas. A pot roast becomes beef and noodles. A pound of ground beef browned with onion becomes half sloppy joes and half the start of chili that goes in the freezer for a cold night.
For casseroles, I now split the recipe into two 8-by-8 pans before baking. One gets baked, one gets wrapped and frozen. That way the ziti shows up again in three weeks, when we actually want it, instead of on day three when we don't.
The arithmetic, so far
I added up our groceries for the first three weeks of March: $142, $131 and $118. Before I started paying attention, February ran about $150 a week. That's not a big drop yet, but the waste column in the notebook went from a lot of crossed-out items to two: half a bag of spinach and a heel of bread I forgot.
I'm also learning to halve recipes without ruining them. Soups and casseroles halve fine. Baking is fussier, since half of three eggs is a nuisance, so I beat the eggs in a cup and pour out what I need. Meatloaf halves fine if you make it into a smaller loaf and check it about 15 minutes sooner with a thermometer, 160 degrees for ground beef.
It's a little sad, honestly, setting two plates. The kitchen is the room where I miss the noise most. But Greg said something on Thursday, over the third night of ziti, that stuck with me. "You don't have to feed the whole neighborhood anymore. Just feed us." He's right, and he usually doesn't say that much at dinner.
I'll keep writing down what works. If you've been cooking for two for a while and have a trick for halving a recipe that calls for one egg, I'm listening.
