Cooking For One (Cooking for fun!)

I do a pretty good job of cooking for two. I do it one to five times a week and I usually manage an average of only one hot dog or frozen pizza based meal every 15 days. I know like, two ways to cook a chicken breast and they're both great.

But sometimes I'm not cooking for two or even 2+. Sometimes I cook for one. Like right now! And there are a lot of important considerations when cooking for one. I'm going to exhaustively list all of them. 

The Rule of Knives (?)

You can't use a knife 'cause you'll be sitting in front of the computer watching music videos on YouTube (or similar). If you're going to cut it, it needs to happen at the prep stage and not at the eating stage. So the Rule of Knives is that you can't need a knife to eat it.

I guess if you're using a knife as a fork by spearing stuff with it you're okay but that also means you're probably cooking for one in Alaska after having killed a bear and are not reading this.

Can You Put It In Eggs?

You'd be surprised at how many things fit inside of a sufficient quantity of eggs. Call it a "scramble" so you feel better about yourself.

Here's a few things you can put in eggs:

• Capers
• Mustard
• Pepperoni
• Diced x where x is equal to some vegetable
• Any cheese
• Milk
• Water
• Sour Cream
• -Cloves (Careful with this one; note the negative sign)
• Any leftover meat; diced
• Hot sauce
• Leftover eggs (Recursive Property. Watch your exponents and be sure to check your answer!)

Don't put these things in eggs:

• Uncooked Rice
• Cloves
• Metal filings
• Moldy hot dog buns
• Apple cider vinegar
• Crisco

In all honesty, the set of things you can put in eggs is much larger than the set of things you cannot put in eggs. 

If you can eat it by itself, you can eat it in eggs.

Will It Fit On Bread?

If you were thinking "A Kentucky Brown fits on bread, douche!" then I assure you that you are the douche because you're ignoring (or willfully forgetting!) the Rule of Knives. Open faced sandwiches don't even really fit on bread - they're only sandwiches nominally - and they often require the use of a knife. So unless you're going to make a Kentucky Brown scramble by preparing the sandwich-meal and then dicing it up and putting it in a skillet with a dozen eggs you can fuck right off. 

I've lost my train of thought. 

If it fits on bread, it can be a meal for one. Did you grill some righteous steaks last night? Do you want to eat on the couch? Put that steak on some bread, friendo. Now you have a steak sandwich - no knives required. 

Other things that can be put on bread:

• Hot dogs
• Hamburgers
• Brisket
• All meats
• Lunch meats
• Eggs (but now you're just showing off)
• Mushrooms
• Cheese
• Cheese
• Cheese

As long as it's on bread, you can take it with you, sans knife and not have to fuck about with remembering which side of the plate the dessert spoon goes on. 

Protip: It goes on the top side!

Borne of Desperation

This is perhaps most importantly of all. If you really had your shit together you would have made a real meal or you'd go out and buy a six pack of High Life for dinner. Or like, pick up fast food.

So to truly be a meal made for one, someone listening to the contents must be cringing on the inside (or on the outside, if you're doing it right). 

Example: 

"OMG all I had for dinner last night was [tuned out]."

"That sounds great! I had a mustard and Velveeta omelette with diced onions and diced ham and diced american cheese slices and diced leftover mac n' cheese."

"::cringes::"

Takeaways (Leftovers! Ha!)

No knives. Eggs, bread and desperation. That's all you need. That's it. Now you're cooking with fire (for one).

Hey speaking of leftovers, that's obviously a dinner for one option but that demonstrates a certain amount of foresight that isn't really in the spirit of a real meal for one. 

Unless you're making a Lo Mein sandwich. 

Post-Labor World

Schools do a stupid job of preparing us for life.

I mean, clearly they do a good job of preparing us for standardized testing - which is super important when you're an accountant or middle manager or whatever - but they don't do much for anything else.

When you hit college you might be lucky enough to receive training specific to your field (hi, pre-Pharm!) but as countless others have doubtless observed before me, college teaches you to learn. It increases your capacity to figure stuff out and type things into Wikipedia and Google. That's a good skill to have when you're trying to figure out how to put together a mail merge in Word. You have to google that shit.

Unfortunately, this "teaching to learn" thing leaves people (me) totally floundering in other areas. I'm sure eliminating Shop from high school was an awesome thing that cut the number of severed fingers received on campus in half (joke![?]). But now there's a big knowledge-void in my life.

Sometimes, you find that you aren't at work. This might be on a weekend, or a weekday evening. Sometimes it's even a week day but that's such a rare event as to hardly bear mention.

Anyway you're there, not at work, and not needing to use Excel or Powerpoint for anything. Not even electively.

Surprise! There's a list of other things that you're supposed to do and suddenly you're adrift. I have to broom the floor? With what? Why does this sweeping thing look so much like a mop? Now your kitchen (or wherever you keep your non-porous floors) is sitting under a quarter inch of soapy standing water and your mop is jammed in the toilet. There's probably also blood everywhere. No one survives.

Where's the mopping class? Or the "keep your house clean enough that the bugs don't take over" class? How about "don't cook that chicken, stupid, because it's three inches thick and will take four hours to become edible." By the way, if you have an 8 oz. chicken breast you should butterfly that shit 'cause it'll cook up in like six minutes flat.

Don't vaccuum up that string of pearls! It'll wreck your shit. If you hold the hammer that way, you're gonna end up like that guy in Casino who gets his hand smashed with a hammer! Just wear some fucking safety goggles because one of those rabbits you hit with the mower is going to come out fast and in bits!

No one teaches us these things. So you spend half of your time learning trial-by-fire style. Did you almost just now lose an eye because you made a rookie error with a drill press? Lesson learned! Or perhaps you're momentarily gifted with foresight. You think, "I don't actually know what all of these cleaners under the sink do..." And then you have to go online! You are using this blessed knowledge of learning to Google (or Bing, if you're a dick) "how to clean a sink". And it turns out you were doing it wrong and at no point does it involve one of those gimp masks with the toilet brush attachment.

Pause.

I fully understand the concept of subserviance and the like, dom/sub thing that's implicit with those masks... But I think it takes a very, very specific set of people to

1. enjoy wearing the mask and using it
2. enjoy watching someone wear the mask and use it.

The day I pick up a toilet brush and think "this is hot" is the day that I need to check into some kind of asylum, Final Destination 2 style.

Resume.

I guess when I say that school has done a shitty job of preparing us (me) for life I may have been overstating my point a bit. They don't teach you how to chop a mortise and tenon with a chisel because they know you can "pick up a book" (internet) and learn how. And they don't teach you how to bake a cake (Protip: remove eggs from their shells first for best results) because they figure you'll either fuck it up once and learn from it or read up on it beforehand.

But it still seems a little dismal. If the point was just to be able to research stuff then we'd get a business card with "Google" on the front and "Fuckin', Google" on the back when we turn five and that would be that. We're tought physics and grammar n' shit so we can kind of get a head start on useful skills that may take a long time to perfect. Or even do passably.

So maybe something like a head start on "living life outside of academia and work" or "feeding yourself and others" might still be worth it.

A final thought:

Recess is gone. Now if someone wants to get good at throwing handfuls of gravel at little children they're going to have to look it up online. Or learn by doing (throw straight, not up in the air! bigger handfuls! learn the pattern of the teacher's gaze!) I grew up in the 15 minute recess era and posters around my neighborhood all speak to how well I am able to throw gravel at little children to this very day.

I think I just wish I had a class that would have tought me how to hammer a nail without constantly bending that shit.