There’s also a self-indulgent component of my meal-prep-hate in which I find cooking to be meditative and I enjoy the creativity behind coming home and making myself something to eat as a part of my wind-down-ritual. This semester, I’ve been making large quantities of Japanese rice and keeping it in a tupperware (I have at least one), and I’m lucky enough to get to go to the farmer’s market near school every Thursday. I buy about a week's worth of veggies (on average about $20), so typically I’ll have some iteration of rice, vegetables, and usually an egg. Sometimes there are chickpeas, other types of beans, there can be olives thrown in or kimchi, sometimes the vegetables are turned into a soup and poured over the rice, but bottom line, the base of rice and veggies has been unchanging. 

Hm. This one is tricky. There is something very difficult about cooking dinner for one. Being as “easy weeknight dinners for one” is a widely googled phrase without much hope for an answer, it’s likely a conundrum understood by most. There’s a beautiful unreliability to the average college student’s life; Much of the time, the week takes form as it goes on, a dinner plan that gets thrown into the mix that you weren’t expecting, a last minute drink plan gets made, so you find yourself shoving a piece of toast into your mouth as you run out of the door, your hunger gets the better of you and you end up grabbing something on the way home, or maybe you decide to eat popcorn for dinner – sue me. Meal prepping doesn’t really work so well. (I’m sure it does for some, but for me, meal prepping is sad and I don’t have the capacity – or the right number of tupperware – to make seven days of food on a Sunday.)

Roisin introduced me to making vegetable curry at home with that Thai Kitchen little jar of paste that you can buy at the grocery store – that has been life changing, I love the stuff. I find that my cooking for one is usually some kind of soy sauce laden food; I know I’ll never get sick of it and it puts me back together after mentally running around during the day… I don’t really photograph my college meals – though maybe I should – mostly because the lighting is crappy and I’m usually tired and sometimes the food just gets thrown on to the plate in a meh way. My college meals are some of the most restorative meals I cook; they are straightforward, and while they may not make someone ooh and ahh, they always leave me full in a way that makes me feel held and deeply satisfied – always a good reminder that small pockets of comfort can be created through a bowl full of rice, vegetable, egg, sauce.