Cooking for one

When I moved into my own flat in Da Nang last spring, I made one big mistake in the kitchen. I cooked the way my mother does, for a family of five. Every evening I ended up with a huge pot of soup and nobody to share it with. By Thursday I was sick of it, and the rest went in the bin. After a month I had wasted more food than I'd eaten.

So I changed my approach. The first thing I learned was to shop for three days at a time, not seven. A small market near my building sells vegetables by the handful, so I can buy one tomato or two eggs without feeling silly. One of them saves me the last bunch of herbs, which she says would only go to waste anyway.

The second lesson was about the rice cooker. I used to think of it as a machine for rice and nothing else. In fact, you can steam fish, boil eggs and even make a simple porridge in it. Better still, it keeps a meal warm for hours, so I can cook at lunchtime and eat when I get home.

Cooking in batches helped too, though not in the way I expected. I don't make five identical lunches any more. Instead, I prepare a base on Sunday, such as braised pork, and add something fresh each day. On Monday it comes with a boiled vegetable, on Tuesday with a fried egg, and by Wednesday it's a soup. It feels like a different meal every time.

Honestly, the hardest part isn't the cooking. It's eating alone. At first I ate in front of my phone, which made everything taste of nothing. Now I lay the table properly, even for one, and I call my sister while I eat. She lives in Hue, and we're usually both in our pyjamas. It sounds like a small thing, but it changed my evenings.

If you've just moved out, my advice is to start small. Learn two or three dishes you can cook without a recipe. Don't feel guilty about the nights when dinner is just noodles and an egg. Last week I cooked a proper meal for a friend, and she said it was the best she'd had in months. I didn't tell her it was my fourth attempt.