8 Quick and Easy Single Person Dinner Ideas
Cooking for one is a skill nobody teaches you, and most recipes actively work against it.
Scale a four-serving dinner down and you end up holding half an egg and a quarter of an onion.
I ate a lot of toast before I worked this out.
Everything below was written for one person from the start, so the amounts already work.
1. Tortellini Soup For One
Italian sausage, cheese tortellini, chicken broth, spinach, Roma tomato, garlic, onion, thyme and a little cream.
Thirty minutes for one bowl.
Soup is the thing people assume they cannot make alone, and this is the argument against that.
Add the tortellini in the last few minutes.
Left to sit in hot broth they swell and go to pieces.
2. Stuffed Peppers For One
Two pepper halves filled with lean ground beef, spinach, tomato, garlic, onion, Italian seasoning and cheddar.
Twenty-five minutes.
Stuffed peppers are usually a tray of six, so a recipe built around one pepper is genuinely useful.
Microwave the halves for two minutes before stuffing them if you like them soft, since twenty-five minutes leaves them with some bite.
3. Sheet Pan Gnocchi and Peppers
Gnocchi roasted on one tray with cooked sausage, bell pepper, cherry tomatoes, shallot, garlic, Italian seasoning and olive oil.
Thirty-five minutes.
Roasted gnocchi goes crisp outside and chewy inside, which is nothing like boiled gnocchi.
Give the pieces room on the tray, because crowded gnocchi steams.
One tray, one person, nothing else to wash.
4. Single-Serve Sushi Bake with Salmon
Salmon, sushi rice, cream cheese, Japanese mayo, sriracha and furikake baked in one small dish, with seaweed, avocado, cucumber and green onion to scoop it up.
Eighteen minutes.
Baking it in a single ramekin is the whole trick to scaling this down, since a sushi bake is usually a party dish.
5. Pasta for One in 10 Minutes
Five ingredients and no measuring, which is the honest version of what most of us cook alone anyway.
Pasta, butter, Parmesan, salt and pepper.
Ten minutes.
Save a splash of the pasta water before you drain it.
That starchy water is what turns butter and cheese into an actual sauce.
6. Honey Garlic Tofu for One
Tofu crisped in cornstarch then glazed with honey, soy, garlic, ginger, vinegar and sesame oil, over rice.
Twenty minutes.
Press the tofu first, even briefly between two plates.
Wet tofu steams, never crisps, and the coating slides off.
7. Fried Rice for One
Sausage, cooked rice and frozen vegetables with garlic, ginger, onion, oyster sauce, soy sauce and sesame oil.
Fifteen minutes, and there is no egg in it.
Cold rice from the fridge is what makes fried rice work, because the grains stay separate.
Fresh warm rice turns to porridge in the pan.
This is the recipe that justifies cooking too much rice on purpose.
8. 10-Minute Quesadillas
A tortilla with cheddar, pinto beans, red bell pepper, green onion and pickled jalapeño.
Ten minutes, one serving.
Scatter cheese under and over the filling so the quesadilla glues itself shut, which stops it falling apart when you cut it.
Tips for Cooking for One
Buy proteins you can portion and freeze flat, like chicken breasts, ground meat, shrimp and fish fillets.
Frozen flat in a bag, they thaw in minutes, not overnight.
A small skillet, a small saucepan and a sheet pan cover almost everything on this list.
Shop the butcher and fish counters, because they will sell you a single piece and the packaged shelves will not.
Keep a few jars that do a lot of work on their own, such as pesto, curry paste and chili crisp.
Notes on Buying Small
Half an onion, half a pepper and half a lemon all keep a few days wrapped in the fridge, so plan two dinners around the same vegetable.
Bags of frozen vegetables beat fresh for one person, because you take what you need and the rest stays frozen.
Buy herbs as a growing pot if you can, since a cut bunch is always too much for one person.
Most of these keep a day or two if you do want a second meal, though the pasta and the quesadilla are best eaten straight away.