Cooking for Two Without Wasting Half the Groceries

For the first year we lived together, we threw away about a third of the fresh food we bought. I know the figure because Bastian, who records everything, weighed our food waste for one month out of curiosity. It came to 6.8 kilograms. Half a bag of spinach, most of a bunch of coriander, a cauliflower that went brown, two-thirds of a pot of cream. For someone who used to cook professionally, it was embarrassing.

The problem is that supermarkets sell food for families. Recipes are written for four. Two people trying to follow both end up with leftovers they do not want and halves of things they do not use. Here is what fixed it for us, in roughly the order it made a difference.

Plan meals around ingredients, not recipes

The biggest change was in how I plan the week. Most people pick five recipes and buy everything each one needs. That guarantees waste, because five recipes usually need five different herbs, three different vegetables and two kinds of cream.

Instead, I pick two or three main ingredients and plan the week around using all of them. A typical week looks like this:

• One whole chicken: roasted on Sunday, leftovers in wraps on Monday, carcass into stock for a soup on Wednesday.
• One big bunch of coriander: in Monday's wraps, Tuesday's dal and Thursday's rice.
• One cabbage: slaw on Monday, stir fried on Tuesday, in the Wednesday soup.

It sounds restrictive. In practice, the week has variety because the cooking methods differ, and nothing is left at the end. It is how restaurant kitchens think about stock, and it works just as well in a two-person flat.

Buy less, more often

A big weekly shop works for families. For two people, buying fresh food twice a week wastes much less, because you are only guessing three days ahead instead of seven. We do one main shop on Saturday for dry goods and things that keep, and a small top-up on Wednesday for fresh vegetables and herbs. The Wednesday trip takes 15 minutes on the walk home from work.

We also stopped buying multipacks and offers we did not plan for. Three-for-two on peppers is not a saving if one pepper goes soft in the drawer.

Learn the half-portion tricks

Some foods simply do not come in two-person sizes. These are the ones that caused most of our waste, and how we handle them now.

Cook once, eat twice, but differently

Batch cooking is common advice, and for two people I think it is often wrong. Cooking a pot of chilli that feeds eight means eating chilli for four days, and by day three one of us gives up and orders something. That is how leftovers end up in the bin.

What works better is cooking a base that becomes two different meals. A pot of slow-cooked beans becomes a stew on Monday and a soup with greens on Thursday. A tray of roasted vegetables becomes a side on Sunday and a pasta sauce on Tuesday. The second meal should feel like a different dinner, not a reheated one.

Keep a use-first shelf

We have one shelf in the fridge, at eye level, for things that need eating soon. Opened jars, half vegetables, leftovers. Whoever cooks checks that shelf first. It is a simple habit and it probably saved more food than anything else on this list, because most waste happens when something gets pushed to the back and forgotten.

Bastian and I split the kitchen jobs so that I plan and shop and he checks the shelf on Sundays and Wednesdays. If you are dividing household jobs between two people, our article on sharing daily tasks explains how we ended up with that split.

Freeze smarter

A small freezer is the best waste tool a couple has. Ours is a three-drawer under-counter freezer, and we freeze single portions, never big tubs. A tub of soup for four is useless for two people on a Tuesday. Two-portion bags, flat, labelled with the date, defrost quickly and stack neatly.

We also keep a list taped to the freezer door of what is inside. Without it, things sit there for a year.

A real week, start to finish

To show how this fits together, here is last week in our kitchen. Saturday's shop: one chicken, one cabbage, one big bunch of coriander, a bag of carrots, a bag of onions, lentils, rice, eggs, yoghurt and a loaf. Wednesday's top-up: spinach, two tomatoes, lemons. Total spend for the week was 41 for two people, plus things we already had in the cupboard.

• Sunday: roast chicken with carrots and onions.
• Monday: chicken wraps with cabbage slaw, yoghurt and coriander.
• Tuesday: red lentil dal with rice, coriander on top, half the cabbage stir fried on the side.
• Wednesday: chicken stock from the carcass, soup with carrots, the rest of the cabbage and spinach.
• Thursday: egg fried rice using Tuesday's leftover rice and the last of the coriander.
• Friday: leftover soup and toast, or out if we are tired.

By Friday the fridge held half a lemon and some yoghurt. That is what a low-waste week looks like for us: not perfect, just close to empty.

The result after six months

Six months after that first weighing, Bastian weighed our waste again for a month. It was 1.9 kilograms, mostly peels and bones, which we now use for stock where we can. Our food shopping fell by about 18 percent over the same period, which paid for a weekend away. You can read how we spent it in our guide to planning a weekend trip on a fixed budget, and more two-portion cooking ideas are in Kitchen Notes.

None of this is complicated. It just requires cooking for the household you actually have, not the family the supermarket imagines.