Cooking for one is a real challenge. More accurately, it's a challenge if you care at all about being efficient. If cooking 5 separate meals per work week doesn't bother you, then cooking for one is theoretically simple - you find five meals you're interested in eating, and cook them in turn. However, it's clear that cooking in this kind of ad hoc way presents several problems. You end up buying too much food, it's hard to think of five discrete meals every single week, and it takes a lot of time. Unless you happen to be home all day, and few people who are cooking for one can afford to do that, there has to be a better answer. Otherwise, it's all to easy to stumble out of your front door in the direction of the nearest pizza joint, which for me happens to be exactly 5 yards due west of my apartment.

I organize my cooking around a theme dish or ingredient every week. Quite often, it's a recipe I've just learned, or a recipe I've recently read something interesting about. Other times, I chose an old favorite, a food I know backwards and forwards. In keeping with a few recent posts, a common "week centerpiece" for me is a roast chicken. Indeed, a chicken is one of the most versatile of core ingredients. Well stuffed with thyme, and rubbed with olive oil, salt, pepper, and lemon, a chicken yields not only a hot, crisp, delicous skin, to be stuffed unceremoniously in my mouth just as the unfortunate bird emerges from the oven, but also a fragrant and considerable flesh, which can be used in sandwiches, pot pies, risotto, rice, pasta, and even pizzas. The roasting juices are almost unholy when used to dress pasta along with pine nuts and raisins in the jewish fashion, or tipped into a pan to roast crispy deeply flavorful fingerling potatoes. The carcass, now stripped clean, should be boiled for a couple of hours along with a carrot, onion, and bouqet of strong herbs, which yields a wonderful stock with which to make your risotto, or provides a particularly tasty base for an invigorating vietnamese style soup, spiked with roughly chopped chilis, ginger, and coriander. Since there ought to be some thyme left over, and since there is probably an extra mushroom or two post risotto, weeks like this usually end for me with a large portabello stuffed generously with thyme butter, roasted for ten minutes, and then jammed into a soft roll lined with spicy mustard and sopped in the buttery mushroom juices left in the oven pan. Of course, the fact that there are some potatoes likely around means that a sort of omlette with diced oil-softened tubers is a back-up possibility on Friday night, if I've run out of other things to eat. The goal, in other words, is to be left with an utterly empty refrigerator by the end of the week, except for a few condiments and other staples.

My menu for this week is not quite so complex, but I think it happens to be equally good. As previous posts have shown, I rather enjoy bread. But man can't live by bread alone, it's been said, and actually I agree that even the best crispy hand made fugasse or baguette can become tiresome if you eat nothing else all week. But a good bread, accompanied by a soup, perhaps, can really be a treat. Of course ,it's even better if the bread is a substantial player itself, especially if you're unable to make a really first class loaf in your home kitchen (I certainy can't). A prosciutto ring, I think (which I much prefer called "lard bread"), is the perfect answer - forgiving, easy, and bold. In a large bowl, just combine 2 cups plus 3 tablespoons of flour, 1 tablespoon of honey, some instant yeast, coarsely ground black pepper to taste, 3/4 teaspoon of salt, and 3/4 cup of prosciutto, the Italian ham. Add about a cup of water and knead the dough aggressively for about ten minutes, until quite elastic. Roll into a long rope, about 18 inches, and shape into a ring (my cookbook says that the ring will be about 7 inches in diameter with a 3 inch hole in the centre, but I never take such measurements seriously). All the bread to rise for an hour, and glaze with four teaspoons of bacon fat, which you've acquired by frying two rashers of thick bacon in a pan for a few minutes. Put in a preheated oven, and bake for about about 30 minutes, monitoring the heat to make sure it isn't burning. Once you pull the beautiful ring out of the oven, glaze it again with fat, and leave to cool entirely.

The main part of the week's food made, it's now important to pair this with the right things. Of course, you should make a BLT with the bacon you rendered: no one else in your workplace or school will have such a nice lunch, and you're saved from wasting perfectly good food. To go with the ring, however, I'd think you need to think hard about the prosciutto and the bacon - you need soups that work with those ingredients. Thankfully, there are dozens. My favorite, though, is a shocking bright green pea soup, best made with frozen petit pois, chicken stock, a head of garlic roasted in the oven for an hour with oil, and maybe half a pint of cream or half and half, all cooked together for about ten minutes and then processed in either a machine or by one of those wonderful hand held puree-ers. While you're at it, of course, the remaining cream can be salvaged by using it to replace the sour cream in the blueberry muffins I've posted just below, for which you should have enough flour from bread leftovers, or simply as a delicious replacement for milk in the morning oatmeal, which of course should be made even better by directing the remaining few berries into the service of a coulis. In case the pea soup isn't enough, though, I've had great success throwing a handful of lentils in a pot with some water, spinach, and lemon juice - as even the French know, the earthiness of lentil is a perfect match for smoked pork, though if lentils aren't your thing a simple tomato soup or gazpacho would work perfectly, especially if you've been clever enough to remember a little basil in your soup.

The really astonishing thing with all this is that it won't cost me more than $40 for the week, and I can make all the food I need in a couple hours on Sunday, supplemented with a few minutes of effort during the week. Sure, I could eat out all the time - but that would be expensive and time consuming, and certainly not healthy. I could also buy ready to eat foods, but I hate spending money on food I can make better myself, if I even could be sure what was in that stuff to begin with. So yes, part of all is comes from the fact that I'm both poor and cheap - but it's also a good idea, I think, especially since the effort required isn't all that much.