Also, it’s really hard to cook for one. I end up spending as much on food that goes bad before I can eat it as it would have cost me to get a $5 value meal.
It primarily requires planning your meals ahead. If you don’t mind left overs it’s even easier. If you eat meat, properly portioning it and freezing the excess simplifies it. Planning multiple meals a week that use the same or similar ingredients saves a bunch and prevents waste.
Agreed. Amortized it much cheaper but when you have an empty kitchen with only a box of macaroni and cheese, getting groceries can feel very expensive.
There are cheap, single serving meals, such as:
- baked potato - extra lazy version is 6 min in the microwave, add toppings
- oatmeal - overnight oats, microwave (3 min, water shouldn’t quite cover oats), etc
- sandwiches - lots of options; freeze extra bread and cheese
- eggs - scrambled, fried, boiled; eggs last weeks
I got through college cooking stuff like this. It was cheap, quick to make small portions, and didn’t require many seasonings. I lived on sleek something like $45-50/month, which covered the vast majority of my meals.