Cooking for One

       Cooking is a lot of work. It takes a lot of time to buy the ingredients, prepare the food, and wash the dishes after the meal is over. It can take hours to finish the tasks associated with one meal. Because cooking takes so much work, many people are not motivated to cook if they are only going to cook for themselves. Cooking for one person just doesn’t seem to be worth all of the work involved. That is a problem because it creates bad eating habits like eating fast food, skipping meals, or eating frozen dinners. College students think it is too much work to cook for just one person.

       Dinner groups are a great solution for people who hate to cook for themselves. A dinner group is a group of friends that decides to eat dinner together every night. The job of being the cook rotates every day that the group meets for dinner. Most college dinner groups meet Monday through Thursday, to allow group members time on the weekends to go on dates and visit friends. Sometimes group members even meet people who introduce them to their friends, so dinner groups are a great way to make friends (and maybe even find dates!). If there are four people, everyone cooks dinner one day each week from Monday to Thursday. If you are only in charge of cooking one meal each week, you can simply go to someone’s house on the other days each week and not need to spend time cooking. Dinner groups allow busy students to eat healthy meals every night, but only cook once a week. This is an excellent way to eat healthier and maybe even make a new friend.

       Here is another option to help college students eat well if they don’t enjoy cooking. Meals that are prepared in bulk and then frozen to cook later are called “freezer meals,” and they are very popular for people with busy schedules. Lots of people like to make these meals. You can buy all of the ingredients when they are on sale and instead of only buying one portion, you buy an extra one. You cook one and put one in the freezer to cook later. This method of preparing meals allows you to spend time preparing the food and cleaning up one time for two meals, so it is more efficient.

       Instead of preparing one meal and saving one, students can cook extra food when they cook and save the leftovers. If there is a meal that you like, you can cook two portions on one day and save the extra portion to eat the next day for dinner. Making leftovers is another excellent way to eat healthy if you don’t like to cook for one person.

       Saving leftovers, making freezer meals, and organizing a dinner group are three ways to solve the problem of unhealthy eating habits for students who don’t like to cook one meal at a time. These methods make cooking more efficient, while still being able to prepare healthy food. Students need to eat healthy, and there are ways to overcome bad eating habits so that they can eat the nutrients they need. Cooking healthy meals will still take work, but it is worth it to find ways to eat well while in college. 

Exercises