On cooking

[robbat2]

I enjoy eating spicy food. The full gamut of spicy - from mexican to thai, and all the way in between.
Since I've moved away from my parents, I've been doing 90% of the food preparation (of the remaining 10% it's been more going out than Marissa cooking). That in itself however is not my problem, it's just that the real problem is more noticable because of how often I cook.

At least once a week, I try to cook something with a kick to it. However whenever I've been on my own, cooking spicy stuff for one has turned out to be on the edge of too spicy. On this front, I've got 3 things of leftover spicy food in the freezer - chilli-cilantro beef; lamb tandori; and tonight's thai green curry (beef).

Cooking for one has also been challenging, in that it's significently easier to get the quanties right with larger groups - to cook for one, you need smaller quantities of everything, and it just doesn't work right. Can anybody suggest tricks or tips on this?

Regardless of how many I'm cooking for, I find it takes 1-2 hours to prepare and eat most meals. How do resturants manage to get their prep time down so much (besides having the vegetables ready to throw in).

Hints? Tips? Recipies with quantities for a single person?

Comments

[morethanreal.livejournal.com]

For things I can freeze, I tend to just cook a regular portion. When I have time I'll make lots of side dishes and when I need food I get a combination of those things... Like a Korean-style meal.

I find that in general it's not too tricky to cut the quantities down although I've gotten many comments like "just one?" from the person giving me meat :) There are things I have to buy in large quantities and for those things I became very good at cooking it many different ways so I can finish it before it goes bad... Herbs like cilantro and parsley are a pain since they come in big bunches and you can't use a lot of it, so I started growing them. The Vietnamese herbs are annoying in the same way except I don't know how to grow them... grr.

Restaurants tend to do hours of prep before customers start coming in. Also the line cooks are really fast to begin with, and they tend to do only one thing (salad, grilling, frying, etc..).