I learned to cook a few basic dishes, all in the Mexican theme for some reason--quesadillas, enchiladas, nachos, etc. Easy enough to do.
Lately, however, I've been busy as hell and uninclined to cook, so I've been living on various frozen foods, mostly from the newly-opened Trader Joe's, which is cheap and interesting food. The fridge is empty, but the freezer is stuffed.
One of the nice things about being single is that you can experiment with all kinds of foods, something that for some reason you don't do when you're cooking for two.* So I've been having blintzes and perogies for breakfast and a variety of random stirfries and odd food-in-a-bag for dinner. (Yes, I know, probably not as healthy as fresh veggies and whatnot, but it's the best I'm gonna manage, particularly nights when I work. And at least it's a step up from TV dinners.)
Tonight, I had something called gnocchi in gorgonzola sauce.
I still don't know what the hell it was, but it was awesome.
Suggestions of other great frozen food cheerfully welcomed.
*Probably the same reason that a single person can treat a can of beer and a jar of salsa as dinner, but you can't if someone else might watch you. Possibly there is a research paper in this somewhere.
Try their shepherd's pies, chicken and cheese enchiladas, chicken teriyaki bowls, and stuffed salmon. (Also, the salty, sweet, and nutty trail mix is AWESOME.)
Addendum: The frozen cheese tortelini in pesto ain't bad, either.
One box of stuffed tortellini...
One can of Chunky Soup.
Put one, then the other in a saucepan. Cook until tortellini cooked. (You may need to add a little extra water.)
Delicious. Terrible for your figure.
One can tomato soup.
One box white cheddar pasta.
Cook pasta according to directions, on stovetop.
Cook soup according to directions, on stovetop or in microwave.
Pour soup into pasta pot.
Mmmmm, comfort food.
For a complete meal, Stouffer's butternut squash ravioli frozen dinner is YUMMY. Butternut squash-stuffed pasta of any kind is yummy. Mmmm, hungry now.
Other frozen foods of a tasty variety are chinese dumplings/pot stickers if possible.
Put a couple pieces of chicken in a small frying pan with a few spoonfulls of water and cook it until it is not frozen. Add some frozen veg, a little more water, and a few spoons of the simmer sauce. Everything cooks in together, you can make just enough for one, and it's tasty without being all about the fat and sugar.
One bag of leaf salad from supermarket
Two tomatoes, sliced
Croutons
~100g Streaky bacon, sliced and nuked crispy
Dressing
Takes about 5 minutes to prepare (do salad while nuking the bacon), feeds four (or me for a nice large dinner), satisfies all of protein/fat/fresh stuff appetites.
I also keep a bag of Kransky sausages in the freezer - nuke a few of those to cover the gap between being too drained to cook safely [I once proved that my stove can melt metal] and actually making real food.
Gnocchi is great. If you run out of freezer space, you can get it (it? them? is gnocchi a plural or a collective noun? gah) dried, usually next to the boxed pastas or in the ethnic food section with the Italian stuff. It's really good with vodka sauce.
One of my easy/cheap meals was ramen with their frozen pork gyoza tossed in. Their pre-cooked rice is awesome--no one wants to wait 40 minutes for brown rice to be done (well, I don't)...so the various cooked grain/rice packets make that easy--some of that, some frozen veggies, maybe the pre-cooked rosemary balsamic chicken...good stuff.