When you’re cooking for just one person, you often end up using the same ingredient for a week or two—especially if it’s an interesting or expensive one.
I’ve always hated those “meal plan” suggestions where someone gives you five completely different options for a week’s dinner—a roast chicken and potatoes on Monday, a coleslaw-based salad Tuesday, scallops on Wednesday… If you’re one person, cooking for yourself on a one-person budget, cooking recipes with completely new ingredients every night is just not sustainable! Which is why it’s usually easier, at least for me, to plan by ingredient, not by recipe.
I recently bought a big bag of snap peas at the farmers’ market (snap pea season, hello!!). The bag held enough to make at least two meals, but the snap peas could also go bad if I didn’t use them within a couple weeks. So, that week became about making multiple snap pea dishes, but I wanted them to have different flavor profiles so I didn’t get tired of the fancy spring veggies. I ended up making a snap pea pasta primavera-situation one night (boiling the snap peas and then dropping them into a water bath and slicing them thin, before adding to pasta with mushrooms and lots of parm), and a peanut-coconut-sauce tofu-situation (with blistered snap peas tossed in rice vinegar, an adaptation of the NYT Cooking recipe). One ingredient, multiple experiences!
This is why the method of searching for new recipes by ingredient, and experimenting that way, makes so much sense to me. I might buy a bunch of asparagus that could last me two or three meals, but I don’t want to eat the same three meals one after the other, just because I have asparagus I need to use up. I’ll look up “asparagus” on Bon Appétit, or the NYT Cooking app, or in the indexes of my cookbooks, to discover new ways to approach the same ingredient.
The cooking process becomes like a theme and variations, with every night offering a new opportunity to riff off of something you already know. By diversifying and expanding what you can create from one ingredient, you end up learning new techniques, creating less waste, and expanding your skills, all while eating something new and fresh every day!
Below, I’ve created a few collections of the recipes on my site that all riff off the same seasonal ingredient—just click on the caption below the photo, and you’ll go straight to the recipe, or click on the ingredient name at the top of the collection. You can always search for any ingredient on my site if you’re stuck on what to make! Hopefully they at least inspire you to make new things from foods you already know well. Happy cooking!