On my own for the first time...what to cook?

How much time do you have to deal with food each day? Do you intend to prep on weekends and have everything ready to heat & eat for the week following? Or do you intend to live off ramen, sandwiches, and cereal?

As soon as I moved I bought myself a cookbook for college and uni students, since it's more aimed for young adults leaving home for the first time the recipes are simple and they explain how to budget your money and plan ahead. They also use items you would normally have around the house for measuring like a standard mug. The book I got was Nosh for students 4th edition by joy may, its a UK book so might have some diffrences.

Cook what you feel like eating

I like to look up recipes on allrecipes and pinterest, you can find some easy, cheap and healthy recipes on there I buy salmon fillets, chicken, lots of fruits and veggies..

Checkout cookbooks from the library. When you find a few books you really use, buy them. It's worth the investment. My faves are The Joy of Cooking and How to Cook Everything. I keep a binder for web recipes I've has success with. I find it is much easier to print them out and organize them than to search for them all over again. Food Network's website has reliable and tasty recipes.

Looking through your grocery store sale ads can be a good place to start a menu. A whole chicken can be roasted for one meal, the leftover meat shredded to make a soup, casserole, tacos or to top a salad or pizza, and the bones used for stock. Pork loin can be cut up for chops, sliced thin for stir fry, or cooked slow for a stew. Ground meats can be used in lots of ways and the 1 lb tubes freeze well. Buy whatever fruits and vegetables look fresh and are a good price, they fluctuate with the seasons. If you find a big bag of potatoes or carrots at a good price buy it. They will keep for months in the fridge. Beans and rice are also good budget stretchers that can be bought cheap in bulk. Check out the nutrition info on beans. Beans are as healthy as they are cheap.

When I was in grad school, meals on evenings when I didn't want to spend a lot of time on prep were
a) lentil and veggies (onions, carrots, garlic, mushroom, bell peppers -- you could do celery and tomatoes if you like them, spinach is good too -- really what veg you like), plus whatever spices and herbs you like -- I usually did cumin, and sometimes Tabasco, topped with favorite cheese -- I used mozzarella because part-skim mozz still tastes good, and if you buy a block and shred it yourself, it's relatively cheap -- plus it's soft, so it's easy to grate enough for a serving quickly. And if you buy it block-style, and only shred as much as you need at a meal, it keeps longer. OR
b) spaghetti with jarred tomato-based sauce, topped with more mozzarella. You can also buy frozen meatballs, or buy ground meat and make your own, cook them, and freeze them. If you start heating them in the sauce before you put the water on for the pasta, they'll likely be ready by the time the pasta is. You can also add extra veggies to your sauce (I like bell peppers and mushrooms, but spinach would work well here too, although I would saute it first).

When I had more time, I would do a lot of stir fries. Start by prepping all your ingredients (chop veggies, cut protein into bite-size pieces, have your finishing sauce* ready). Cook ginger and garlic briefly in oil--if you have a well-seasoned pan you can probably get away with two teaspoons for enough food for one person. Add protein (round steak, pork loin, chicken, shrimp, scallops and/or firm tofu are all good choices). In theory, you should remove the protein after it's fully cooked and then cook the veggies, but if you have a wok or a pan larger than the burner, you can get away with moving the protein to a cooler part of the pan (up the side of the wok) when it's just barely cooked, and add whatever veggies you like (my personal favorites are carrots, onions, mushrooms, bell peppers, cabbage, and eggplant, but eggplant takes special treatment, as it will absorb every drop of oil you let it have--I usually just have eggplant by itself, not with other veggies -- I like a combination of eggplant, scallops, and chopped fresh tomatoes in garlic sauce -- aka yu shang or fish-fragrant sauce). I frequently like to throw some peanuts in (I kept dry-roasted peanuts on hand for this because they didn't tempt me to snack on them when I wasn't cooking). Return protein to if you took it out while you were cooking veggies. Give your finishing sauce a stir because the corn starch will have settled. (combine to taste soy sauce, vinegar [rice vinegar, red rice vinegar, black vinegar, or red wine vinegar all work fine], corn starch, sugar if you like, garlic bean-paste or other spicy condiment if you like, black bean sauce if you want a salty-umami taste, etc.--but do this earlier ) Pour over


*Combine to taste soy sauce, vinegar [rice vinegar, red rice vinegar, black vinegar, or red wine vinegar all work fine], rice wine or sherry if you like, corn starch, sugar if you like, garlic bean-paste or other spicy condiment if you like, black bean sauce if you want a salty-umami taste, etc.