Meal planning for one: the portions, the leftovers, the packaging

The short version

• Cook three times a week, not seven. Every cook feeds two or three meals in two different shapes.
• Meat, vegetables, grains and beans divide cleanly. Salt, garlic, chilli, leavening, oil and cooking time do not.
• Never scale a baking recipe down to one. Bake the whole batch and freeze it in slices.
• Change the shape of the leftovers, not just the plate. The same chili twice in a row is fine; three times is how the week ends in takeout.
• Most of the waste happens in the store, not the kitchen: loose produce, the deli and butcher counters, bulk bins, and frozen vegetables.
• Planning for two is not planning for one doubled. It is easier on portions and harder on preferences.

Scaling a recipe from four servings to one

This is the part almost nobody writes down. A recipe for four is not four times a recipe for one, because several ingredients answer to something other than the number of eaters: the surface of the pan, the rate of evaporation, the chemistry of a rising dough, or simply the fact that you cannot buy a quarter of an egg.

Use this table the next time you halve or quarter something.

Three cooking sessions, seven dinners

Cooking every night for one person is the fastest way to quit. Three sessions cover the week if each one produces more than one meal and each meal changes shape at least once. Here is a week written out, built on a pot on Sunday, a tray on Wednesday and about twelve minutes on Friday.

Leftovers that change shape

Eating the same dish twice is efficient. Eating it three times is why people stop planning. The fix is not more variety in the shopping, it is one transformation step in the plan.

Write the transformation in the plan itself, the same way you would write a recipe. If Thursday just says “leftovers”, Thursday will not happen.

• Roast chicken becomes fried rice, a sandwich, or the stock for Friday’s soup.
• Chili becomes a baked potato topping, nachos, or the filling of a quesadilla.
• Roasted vegetables become a frittata, a grain bowl, or a blended soup with stock.
• Cooked grains become fried rice, a cold salad with lemon and herbs, or the base of a bowl.
• Stewed meat becomes a ragu over pasta, or a filling with a fried egg on top.
• Anything at all becomes a freezer portion, labelled with the date, before you get tired of it rather than after.

Most of the waste happens in the store

A grocery list for one person is not a smaller version of a family list. It is a different list, because the packaging was designed for someone else. This is where a solo cook loses food, long before anything reaches the fridge.

• Buy produce loose rather than bagged. Three apples and two onions, not a five pound bag that turns soft in the drawer.
• Use the counters. The butcher and the deli will sell you a single chicken breast or a quarter pound of sliced turkey, which no pre-packed tray will.
• Bulk bins are made for this: two tablespoons of pine nuts, one cup of rice, a handful of dried mushrooms.
• Frozen vegetables beat fresh for one person on anything you cook rather than eat raw. You take the handful you need and the bag waits.
• Bread: buy half a loaf, or slice and freeze the whole thing the day you get home. Toast goes straight from the freezer.
• Fresh herbs are the classic solo tax. Buy a pot that keeps growing, or frozen herb cubes, or accept that you will freeze half the bunch chopped in oil.
• Dairy in the smallest format that exists, even when the bigger one looks like the sensible choice. Sour cream you throw out is not a saving.
• Shop twice a week for fresh and once a month for the pantry, if your store is close. Small trips waste less than one big haul when there is only one of you eating.

Planning for two is a different problem

Cooking for two is arithmetically easier: most recipes for four halve cleanly, and halving is far more forgiving than quartering. Eggs stay whole, a pan stays a normal pan, and a can of tomatoes actually gets used.

The difficulty moves elsewhere. Two people means two sets of preferences, two schedules, and one person quietly eating around the mushrooms. The planning question stops being “how do I shrink this” and becomes “what do we both actually want on a Tuesday”, which is a negotiation, not a calculation.

The practical answer is the same in both cases: cook components rather than finished plates. A tray of roasted vegetables, a grain, a protein and a sauce assemble differently for each person, and leftovers stop being a single fixed dish that somebody has to agree to eat again.

What a solo pantry needs

A short standing list does more for a single cook than any recipe collection. These are the things that turn “there is nothing in the house” into dinner in fifteen minutes, and they all keep.

• Canned beans and canned tomatoes, which together are half the pantry pastas ever invented.
• Rice, pasta and one quick grain like couscous.
• Eggs, the fastest protein in the house and the rescue plan for any night.
• Onions, garlic, lemons, and hard cheese that keeps for weeks.
• Frozen vegetables, frozen bread, and two or three single portions of something you cooked yourself.
• One acid and one salty thing: vinegar, mustard, soy sauce, olives, capers. They are what makes a bowl of leftovers taste deliberate.

Where Olivi fits

Olivi is a meal planning app, and Olive, its AI cooking coach, takes on the two parts of solo cooking that are pure overhead: the arithmetic and the list.

Set your household size to one or two, and the week gets built around it rather than around a family of four. Quantities are recalculated for the number of people actually eating, and scaling up does not put a flat multiplier on leavening agents or strong aromatics, because those never followed a straight line. Unit conversion is non-destructive, so the original recipe stays exactly as it was written.

Your preferences and allergies are set once and hold every week after, which matters more when two people are negotiating than when one person is deciding.

The grocery list comes out of the menu sorted by aisle, with repeated ingredients added together, so you see that one can of tomatoes covers three meals instead of buying three. Portions you cooked ahead are tracked in the freezer, which is the single most useful habit for anyone cooking alone: you know what is waiting before you plan anything new.

Recipes come in from a link, a photo, a PDF, or a TikTok or YouTube video, and nutrition facts are calculated per serving from official food composition data. Olivi runs on the web, on iPhone, iPad and Android, in six languages. It was built in Montreal.