Solo Food: 72 recipes for you alone. Janneke Vreugdenhil

through the baguette or bread roll in the hot oven (or slice it open and toast in the steak pan). Meanwhile, stir the mustard into the mayo in a little bowl, to taste. Slice the warmed bread in half lengthways, then spread both halves with a generous amount of the mustardy mayo and add some lettuce leaves.

      Slice the entrecôte on the diagonal and arrange the slices in the sandwich. Squeeze as much liquid as you can out of the shallot rings and sprinkle them over the meat. Top with the other half of the bread, and dinner is served.

       SMART COOKING

       One of the things I came up against when I started cooking for myself was that I always ended up with leftovers. I had been used to sharing my table with three hungry men, so I was still figuring out how much I actually ate myself. Does this sound familiar? In my experience you gradually get better at this, but it’s still easy to cook too much, especially of things like rice, potatoes and noodles. That’s why I’ve written this chapter, featuring recipes that you can use to turn leftovers from Day 1 into something entirely different on Day 2. Because you don’t want to waste food, and you also don’t want to eat the same thing day after day. What’s more, cooking with leftovers saves time, because rice and potatoes easily need 20 or 25 minutes to prepare. Do it all on Day 1 and that’s time you can save on Day 2 so that you’re done in 10 or 15 minutes. When cooking solo, it pays to be smart!

DAY 1

       Baked sweet potato with olives, feta & chilli

       Baking intensifies the sweetness of sweet potatoes and gives the bright orange flesh a kind of fluffiness – light and soft at the same time. Sweet potato is terrific combined with salty olives, creamy feta and hot chilli pepper. It seems a bit wasteful to have the oven blasting for just one or two sweet potatoes, so I often bake a number of them at once. Once baked, you can easily keep them in the fridge for days, or you can use them to make a quick, flavourful soup.