thoughts on shopping/cooking for two people

Shopping for two people seems to be a lot harder than shopping for one or four or six. I can't just buy one thing, because Jon does have to eat too, but I can't go with the bulk options either because the two of us can't eat that much before it spoils. I've always thought that its a good idea to go with whatever has the lowest unit price but that's not really a good idea. When we moved in here I bought a huge bag of potatoes, made food with potatoes in it a few times, and then went a couple weeks at a time ignoring the potatoes completely. This was a mistake, because the next time I reached into the bag I pulled out what appeared to be a miniature pineapple. I've had similar incidents with big bags of salad and cartons of eggs. I'm still not sure if we should have tried to eat potatoes or salad every night until they were gone, but my new solution is simply to buy less--even with the slightly higher prices, it'll be better in the long run since we won't be wasting so much. (I hope!)

I'm also working on cooking meals from scratch more often, since "easy" meals have the same problem of being designed for either one person or a large group--I love Hamburger Helper, but the box says four servings and generally if we cook it, we eat it all. It feels a little silly and wasteful to me, so I'm trying to cut back on boxed food and put the "leftovers" away first when I do make it. I'm a lot less likely to bother with seconds if I have to pull them out of the fridge and microwave them, and it makes lunches a lot easier.

On the topic of cooking, I stumbled across this site a while back and have just started getting into it. It makes everything seem super easy, without making me feel like a complete failure for not knowing all of this totally obvious stuff. (No, I did not even know how to bake a potato before watching the video. Sad, isn't it?)

The plan for tonight is baked potatoes and salad, with brownies left over from last night. Mmmm.