Since I got married nearly 3 years ago, I now cook almost everyday. In the first months, I discovered its hard work cooking for two! Fresh vegetables I bought perished before I get to use them and our fridge was filled with leftovers. It seems that I am not alone. I found books, articles and websites to help those who cook for two. In this post, I hope to share the numerous online resources on the topic.

First up are books. These are the top three picks from Amazon on the subject:

1. Healthy Cooking for Two (or Just You): Low-Fat Recipes with Half the Fuss and Double the Taste
2. Cooking for Two: 120 Recipes for Every Day and Those Special Nights
3. Quickies for Couples: Fast, Fresh Recipes for Two (Quickies, 1)

I can’t help but notice: Why do books on cooking for two have such long titles? Anyway, next up are recipe sites that have sections devoted to the topic:

1. Recipe Goldmine - The recipes here look easy to do. They are mostly soups, salads and side dishes.
2. All Recipes - Over 500 recipes for two. Read up on the reviews and ratings for each recipe before trying them out yourself.
3. Recipezaar - Scroll to the bottom of each recipe page, and find other recipes compatible to the one you’ve chosen.

Finally, we go to some useful websites. The ones I like the most are Lifehacker and the OAMC site. Lifehacker has collated a lot of great tips from its readers on the topic of cooking for two. I hope you will find them as interesting as I did.

On the OAMC site you will learn about “Once A Month Cooking”. Basically, you cook big batches and freeze it in small portions. Because of this, OAMC is also called “Freezer Cooking”. It makes a lot of sense since preparation and clean up does take up a lot of time. With OAMC, most of time you just need to take the portion needed - say for two, reheat it and you’re done with dinner. I have yet to try OAMC but I found their step by step guide quite useful. It will help us save time and money for groceries. Ordinarily, I’ll go to the grocery every week. But following their tips, I can reduce the frequency to once a month.

There’s also a vegetarian OAMC plan in Recipezaar. I think I’ll find this one really useful, since I find myself preparing less meat dishes and cooking more vegetables. I love that clean up after preparing vegetarian dishes is less of a hassle. I don’t have to go crazy sterilizing everything I used, for fear of salmonella and other malodors left on my kitchenware.

I hope you like the resources I posted here. If you have more you can leave a link to them in the comments below.

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