How Many Dinners Should You Cook a Week When You Live Alone?
Short answer: about three.
If you've been asking yourself how many meals you should cook a week living alone, three cooked dinners is a good place to start for most people. Not seven. Not one heroic Sunday batch that you're sick of by Tuesday. Three dinners, with leftovers, an easy night and a night off filling the gaps.
That number surprises people who've tried to cook every night and felt like they were failing. You weren't failing. Cooking every night just doesn't fit a household of one very well. Here's why, and what a good week looks like instead.
Why three covers the week
Three cooked dinners covers more of the week than it sounds. Many recipes, even scaled for one, make a bit more than a single portion, so a cooked dinner often gives you a second meal. Three dinners can cover five or six nights without much extra effort.
Add the nights you're out with friends, working late or simply not hungry, and three is usually enough to keep you fed well without the fridge filling up with things you meant to use.
Three is also easy to remember and easy to keep. It leaves space. And when a plan leaves space, you're much more likely to follow it for more than a week.
Why cooking every night backfires for one
Cooking seven different dinners a week for one person sounds virtuous. In practice it tends to cause three problems.
More half-used ingredients. Every new dinner brings its own fresh ingredients. Seven dinners might mean seven different vegetables, three herbs and a couple of sauces, each bought in a pack meant for four. You use a bit of each and the rest waits in the drawer until it goes soft.
No room for leftovers. If every night has a new dinner planned, leftovers have nowhere to go. They sit behind the new food and get forgotten.
It wears you out. Deciding, shopping, cooking and cleaning up seven times a week is a lot, especially after work. When it gets too much, the plan collapses all at once, and the groceries bought for it collapse with it.
Cooking less, but on purpose, fixes all three.
What the other nights look like
The nights you don't cook still need dinner. They just don't need a plan with a shopping list attached. Most of them fall into one of these:
- Leftover night. The second portion from a dinner you already cooked. A curry or a pasta sauce is often better the next day anyway.
- Easy night. Something that takes no planning: eggs on toast, a quesadilla, a baked potato with whatever cheese is in the fridge, instant noodles with a handful of spinach and an egg.
- Freezer night. A portion you froze from an earlier week, or a good bag of frozen dumplings.
- Night off. Dinner with friends, takeout, whatever you feel like. No guilt required.
The trick is keeping a few easy-night basics in the house: eggs, bread, cheese, a bag of frozen vegetables, a can of beans. Those staples keep for a good while and turn "nothing to eat" into a ten-minute dinner.
A sample week: cook, leftover, cook, easy, cook, flexible
Here's one way to lay out three cooked dinners across a week:
| Night | What's for dinner |
|---|---|
| Monday | Cook: sheet-pan sausage and peppers |
| Tuesday | Leftover: the rest of the sausage and peppers, in a roll |
| Wednesday | Cook: spinach and chickpea curry with rice |
| Thursday | Easy: eggs with the rest of the spinach, toast |
| Friday | Cook: chicken rice bowl with the leftover rice |
| Saturday | Flexible: out, or leftover curry |
| Sunday | Flexible: freezer night, then plan next week |
Notice what the cooked dinners share. The spinach shows up twice. The rice cooked on Wednesday gets reused on Friday; cooked rice keeps in the fridge for about three to four days if you cool it quickly and keep it covered. The same onion can go into the peppers and the curry. That's how three dinners avoid waste instead of creating it.
When to go up to four or five
Three is a starting point, not a rule. You might want more cooked dinners if:
- You bring lunch to work and want leftovers to cover it. A fourth dinner gives you more second portions.
- You enjoy cooking and it's how you unwind. Then cook more, just keep the shared-ingredient habit so the extra dinners don't mean extra waste.
- Your recipes make exactly one portion. If there are rarely leftovers, a fourth dinner fills the gap.
- You're home every night. If you rarely eat out, you'll need more nights covered.
And you might want fewer, say two, during a busy stretch or when you're traveling. The number should fit your week, not the other way around. The only thing that really matters is that every fresh ingredient you buy has a place to go.
Three dinners, already planned
3Onions plans three dinners a week by default, because three dinners you'll actually make beat seven you won't. On cooking nights, from 4 PM, the app opens straight to tonight's dinner. And the grocery list tells you when a leftover goes into next week's plan, so nothing gets stranded in the fridge.
If three dinners a week sounds about right, join the 3Onions early-access list (the iPhone app is almost here, and your first week will be free). You can also read more about cooking for one.
FAQ
Is it cheaper to cook every day when you live alone?
Not always. Cooking every day often means buying more different fresh ingredients, and more of them go unused. Cooking fewer dinners that share ingredients, and eating the leftovers, usually wastes less food, and food you don't throw away is money you don't throw away.
How many times a week should one person go grocery shopping?
Once a week works well for most people living alone, especially if your three dinners share ingredients. A quick midweek top-up for bread, milk or a fresh herb is fine. More trips usually mean more impulse buys.
What if I don't feel like cooking on a planned night?
Swap it with an easy night or a leftover night, and push the planned dinner back a day or two. Choose dinners whose fresh ingredients will hold for a few days, so a swap doesn't mean throwing anything out.