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Again with the will-I-ever-cook-much, following on where the last post left off.
Three freezers might do it. Compared with a couple who eats together, I'll need to store more stuff and I'll need to store it longer. If a recipe feeds four, and the variety they have in their diet means they eat the leftovers a week later, they're storing two servings for a week. I'd be storing three servings for the first week, two for the second week, and one for the third week, an average of two servings stored over a period of three weeks. This multiplication factor gets carried out to unused portions of ingredients, too, since (in this scenario) I'm not cooking again until two weeks later than the couple would. I am not (consciously) exaggerating; I'm guessing that somewhere near 3x the freezer capacity would put me on an equal footing.
To further multiply the problem, I'm only gastronomically single. Rob gets the top shelf of the freezer. I get the bottom (and by sneakily using those ice packs, I've gradually taken over almost the whole door). Folks who cook and eat in pairs, imagine living in one-sixth of your freezer. Singles, imagine living in half of yours. How would you work that? What clever solutions have you come up with when, say, you've shared the space with roommates?
Some options I have:
- One possibility is an auxiliary freezer. Where to put it is an open question, and we're also kind of trying to CONSERVE electricity, not soak up a lot MORE of it. (Let's not mention the oven, the microwave, the stove, or the crock pot. Shhhh.)
- Another possibility, and for various reasons this is where I want to go eventually, is trying to learn to cook with stuff that can be stored on the shelf. Dried grains are excellent for this if you can handle the glycemic load most of them will give you. Anything sold in dehydrated form would be a serious win (I am never going to re-can half a can of tomato paste, but if it were somehow sold without the water in it, I could easily keep the leftovers). Maybe I should learn to dehydrate stuff myself.
LJ brain, can you see alternatives I'm missing?
Three freezers might do it. Compared with a couple who eats together, I'll need to store more stuff and I'll need to store it longer. If a recipe feeds four, and the variety they have in their diet means they eat the leftovers a week later, they're storing two servings for a week. I'd be storing three servings for the first week, two for the second week, and one for the third week, an average of two servings stored over a period of three weeks. This multiplication factor gets carried out to unused portions of ingredients, too, since (in this scenario) I'm not cooking again until two weeks later than the couple would. I am not (consciously) exaggerating; I'm guessing that somewhere near 3x the freezer capacity would put me on an equal footing.
To further multiply the problem, I'm only gastronomically single. Rob gets the top shelf of the freezer. I get the bottom (and by sneakily using those ice packs, I've gradually taken over almost the whole door). Folks who cook and eat in pairs, imagine living in one-sixth of your freezer. Singles, imagine living in half of yours. How would you work that? What clever solutions have you come up with when, say, you've shared the space with roommates?
Some options I have:
- One possibility is an auxiliary freezer. Where to put it is an open question, and we're also kind of trying to CONSERVE electricity, not soak up a lot MORE of it. (Let's not mention the oven, the microwave, the stove, or the crock pot. Shhhh.)
- Another possibility, and for various reasons this is where I want to go eventually, is trying to learn to cook with stuff that can be stored on the shelf. Dried grains are excellent for this if you can handle the glycemic load most of them will give you. Anything sold in dehydrated form would be a serious win (I am never going to re-can half a can of tomato paste, but if it were somehow sold without the water in it, I could easily keep the leftovers). Maybe I should learn to dehydrate stuff myself.
LJ brain, can you see alternatives I'm missing?
Living out of the freezer
Maybe this won't work for you, but it does for me--except for soups (which I usually freeze in 2-4 serving blocks) I almost never cook more than 2-3 servings of anything. I would rather eat the same thing for 2 or 3 days and (cook more frequently) than loose a single serving of something that doesn't reheat very well after being frozen in the depths of my freezer.
Re: Living out of the freezer
Yeah, about cooking 2-3 servings... I can see that one of my problems is that I so rarely have time. (I am also not good at remembering that many recipes can be halved. Duh.) So I'll cook on a weekend, maybe 6 servings of something, more if it's lasagna, and I probably won't have another "good foot" day free like that for a month. Of course, I'll also try to do things that reheat well. Dijon chicken was a mistake.