Cooking for One: A Five-Day Desi Plan With Leftovers

Four-person recipes, one-person table

Open almost any recipe in our library and the servings say 4. If you live alone, that is the whole problem. Halving works for some dishes and wrecks others, because gravies need enough volume to cook properly and a single onion's worth of masala is hard to get right. The easier answer is to cook a full pot, split it, and change what goes beside it.

This plan uses five real recipes and two cooking sessions. It is built for one adult eating dinner, with a bit left for lunch some days. The food safety rules below matter more than usual, because you are keeping cooked food in the fridge for days.

The rules for keeping leftovers

• Cool cooked food quickly and get it into the fridge within about 2 hours. For rice, aim for within about 1 hour.
• Keep cooked rice no more than 1 day in the fridge, and reheat it until steaming hot. Fresh rice each time is better than old rice reheated.
• Eat curries and daal within three to four days, reheated until steaming hot all the way through. Freeze portions if you will not get to them.
• If chicken or mince is in the mix, cook it to 74 C (165 F) for poultry and 71 C (160 F) for mince.

Using a freezer changes the plan. Daal and chana masala usually freeze reasonably in single portions, though we have not tested each recipe.

Sunday: two pots, about two hours

Pot 1: chana masala. The recipe uses 200 g (1 cup) of dried chickpeas and serves 4. Soak them overnight, boil (45 to 60 minutes in a pot or 10 to 12 in a pressure cooker), then fry the onion, tomato and spices. Four portions.

Pot 2: daal. 200 g (1 cup) of red lentils, a ghee tarka with cumin and garlic. Roughly 30 minutes. It thickens as it cools, so loosen it with a splash of hot water when reheating, as the recipe says.

Fresh rice and roti are cooked on the day you eat them. You also need potatoes and peas for Wednesday, and 3 eggs and a handful of vegetables for Friday.

The five dinners

Mon and Tue come from the Sunday pots. Wednesday is a fresh dish, so you are not eating leftovers three nights in a row. The last quarter of the daal could be Thursday lunch or frozen.

Wednesday: scaled-down aloo matar

Our aloo matar recipe uses 400 g (0.9 lb) of potato, 150 g (1 cup) of peas and 2 tomatoes for four. For one, use a single large potato (about 200 g, 7 oz), half a cup of peas and one tomato, and keep the spice amounts at about half. The recipe cooks the potatoes covered for 12 minutes, then the peas for 8 to 10 minutes. Because a smaller pot loses water faster, check the pan at the 8-minute mark and add a spoonful of hot water if it looks dry.

Friday: scaled-down egg fried rice

Egg fried rice in our library uses 300 g (2 cups) of cold cooked rice and 3 eggs for 3 people. For one, use about 100 g (a bit under a cup) of cold cooked rice and 1 egg, plus a small handful of frozen peas and diced carrot. Use rice cooked the day before and chilled quickly, not rice that sat on the counter. Toss it on high heat, as the recipe says, then mix the scrambled egg back in. It is a 15-minute dinner, ready faster than delivery.

The khichdi insurance policy

Some nights you will be too tired for even the plan. Khichdi is the answer: 150 g (0.75 cup) each of rice and split mung beans, turmeric, salt and about 4 to 5 cups of water, simmered into a soft porridge in around 30 minutes, then a ghee and cumin tarka on top. For one person, a quarter-recipe in a small pot works, or make the full amount and keep it for a second day. Rice-based dishes should not sit in the fridge longer than a day.

Shopping list for the week

• 200 g (1 cup) dried chickpeas, 200 g (1 cup) masoor daal
• 1 kg (2.2 lb) onions, 1 kg tomatoes
• Rice (about 500 g or 2.5 cups covers everything here), whole-wheat flour for roti
• 2 or 3 potatoes, a small bag of frozen peas, frozen mixed vegetables
• Eggs (6 is comfortable), ghee or oil, cumin, turmeric, red chilli powder, garam masala, garlic, ginger
• Plain yogurt for raita

When the plan breaks

Plans fail. The cheapest way to recover is to freeze one portion on Sunday, so a bad week still leaves a dinner. If you are tired of the same flavours, change the finish rather than the pot: lemon on the daal, chaat masala on the chickpeas, a fried egg on top of the khichdi. Degchi's pantry try-out can match what is left in your cupboards to what you can still cook before you shop again.