The new season of “The Bear” is coming soon, and one memorable scene from the last season starts with chef Sydney Adamu, played by Ayo Edebiri, cracking a few eggs into a bowl. She then enters the meditative bliss that is making a perfect omelet. Watching her nudge the golden disk over and around a line of creamy cheese brings to mind the sandwich scene from the 2004 movie “Spanglish,” where Adam Sandler, playing a chef alone in his home kitchen after a long night at the restaurant, slides a fried egg over bacon and tomatoes shingled on a thick slice of toast.

What they have in common is how well they capture the culinary ecstasy of making dishes best prepared as single servings in the quiet of the kitchen. In those moments, all of your senses are attuned to creating this small, simple, beautiful thing.

It works only when cooking for one.

This isn’t to say that’s what the experience is always like. If you’ve been cooking for only yourself for years, you’ve already lived this reality. But if you’re new to it, on your own after crowded college dorms or packed family homes, know that preparing single-serving meals can feel more challenging than cooking for a crew.

Klancy Miller celebrated the joys of cooking for one in her 2016 book “Cooking Solo: The Fun of Cooking for Yourself,” but at a certain point during the pandemic, she burned out in the kitchen and turned to takeout.

“Eventually, I kind of did get back to cooking for myself,” she said, “but in a much more basic way.” She still believes in “going all out for yourself,” but now prioritizes figuring out how to simplify dishes to make regularly.

The key to cooking well for one is choosing the right recipes. These tips will help you navigate what will work for you:

Figure out what you like.

It may seem obvious, but there’s a lot of noise on social media to try, say, eating only meat or surviving on snacks. If you examine what you truly want — and then stock those ingredients — you may be less tempted to order in.

“When you think about what you eat over the course of a week, what do you enjoy?” Miller suggested asking yourself, “and what are the very easy things?”

That second question is critical: Whatever you make should be worth its cost in time, energy and dollars. If you’re craving fries or a complex fine-dining dish, you’re better off going out. The recipes that make the most sense are streamlined, even if they’re as fancy as steak or scallops.

For simple daily sustenance, consider how many times a week you’d be happy having the same dish. Oatmeal for breakfast all week? Quesadillas for dinner once? And maybe once more if stuffed with mushrooms?

Stock up where you can, and relish smaller trips to the store otherwise.

Build a shopping list based on the above, then choose the right quantity of each item. Unless you already make yourself three meals a day or know that you will, stick to buying smaller amounts of groceries, especially fresh items. If you still end up with food on the verge of spoiling, cook it right away to extend its life and avoid having to waste it. (Even lettuce can be stir-fried!)

Larger packages of food generally cost less per ounce, so it’s worth getting them if you can. Pantry staples such as pasta, rice, canned goods, spices and vinegars last, as do freezer foods like shrimp and peas, so you can get those in bulk. And if you know you want yogurt every morning, go for the big tub instead of the small cups.

Making multiple grocery runs a week for perishables doesn’t have to feel like a chore. Miller views going to the grocery store as “Yay! I got out, and it’s the excuse I need to get out of the house.” She buys meat and produce, including herbs, which can give life to pantry ingredients like grains.

Rethink ‘meal prep.’

It’s hard to know what that term even means, but it sounds like an obligation more stressful than making a meal start-to-finish — or ordering delivery. To set yourself up to cook without the anxiety of planning, make dishes that can stretch across multiple meals.

One option you may already be practicing is preparing recipes for four or more servings when you have time. But if you know you’ll be bored of the same thing by Day 3, portion and pack the dish into individual servings to freeze.

If you’re not into big-batch cooking, throw together easy recipes that can be enjoyed just once more in a different dish. Instead of a whole chicken, buy a half bird to get white and dark meat without having to eat it all week.

Make the great meals that are meant for one.

Miller finds that she now cooks the most ambitiously and creatively when hosting dinner parties, but she is returning to doing the same for herself too.

“I believe fundamentally that you should be just as generous to yourself as you are to others,” she said. “You are worth the extravagance. You deserve nice things too, like a really lavish breakfast.”

A hot sandwich with a runny egg ranks high in this category. Eating one right after it’s stacked ensures that the cheese stays melty, the egg oozy and the bread toasty-crisp yet soft. This meeting of egg-in-a-hole and grilled cheese stretches the delight as a fork-and-knife meal to eat leisurely with a cup of coffee. With a cold beer, it’s just as satisfying at dinner. It captures the spirit Henry David Thoreau describes in the opening line of his chapter on solitude in “Walden”: “This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore.”

Cooking for one may seem like a chore, but when you make yourself meals you love, it’s also deeply gratifying.

Tzatziki Tuna Salad

Tzatziki tuna salad. Keep a container of this tuna salad in the refrigerator to turn into sandwiches or enjoy as a salad or dip any time of day. Food styled by Rebecca Jurkevich. (Linda Xiao/The New York Times)

By Genevieve Ko

Tuna salad often includes mayonnaise, but this version delivers a similar creaminess with Greek yogurt, which imparts a freshness to the mix. Here, the yogurt is seasoned with the classic garlic-dill combination of tzatziki, which goes surprisingly well with sharp yellow mustard. Cucumber is traditionally used in tzatziki, but for this tuna salad, celery is also a fun, crunchy variation. (You also can add celery to the salad if starting with store-bought tzatziki.) If you have only tuna packed in water on hand, simply drain the tuna well and stir olive oil into the salad for richness. Sandwich the tuna between bread, mix it into a salad or enjoy it as a dip with chips or crackers.

Yield: 1 Serving

Total time: 10 minutes

INGREDIENTS

For the Tzatziki (or use 1/4 cup store-bought):

1 very small garlic clove
Salt
3 tablespoons plain full-fat Greek yogurt
2 tablespoons finely diced cucumber or celery
1 tablespoon chopped fresh dill
1/2 teaspoon lemon juice

For the Tuna Salad:

1 (5-ounce) can tuna packed in olive oil
1 1/2 teaspoons yellow mustard
Salt and black pepper
Bread, lettuce, cucumber slices or chips, for serving

DIRECTIONS

Make the tzatziki: Smash the garlic, remove the peel, then sprinkle with salt and chop very finely. (The salt helps the garlic break down and tempers its sharpness.) Transfer to a medium bowl and add the yogurt, cucumber, dill and lemon juice. Stir, taste and add more salt.
Make the salad: Add the tuna with its oil and mustard to the tzatziki, and mix well. Taste and add salt and pepper. The salad can be refrigerated for up to 2 days. Eat on its own or as a sandwich, salad or dip.

Curry Roasted Half Chicken and Peppers

Curry roasted half chicken and peppers. This sheet-pan chicken starts with a three-pack of peppers, which will deliver a lot of vegetables with your dinner while saving you money. Food styled by Rebecca Jurkevich. (Linda Xiao/The New York Times)

By Genevieve Ko

A half chicken, cut right between the breasts and back, is sold in most supermarkets and just what you want when cooking for one, offering both light and dark meat, and the juiciness that comes with all the bones. After it cooks — quickly, relative to a whole bird — it leaves you with two meals or one very hearty dinner. Here, this curry-rubbed chicken roasts over peppers and onion, which release their natural sweetness into the pan juices. It’s great over rice or with bread, and leftovers can be simmered with coconut milk for a stewed curry, or chopped and mixed with mayonnaise for a chicken salad sandwich.

Yield: 1 to 2 servings

Total time: 50 minutes

INGREDIENTS

4 tablespoons olive oil
2 garlic cloves, very finely chopped
2 tablespoons Madras or yellow curry powder
3 sweet bell peppers (red, orange and yellow), diced
1 large onion, diced
Salt and black pepper
1 whole half chicken (about 1 1/2 pounds), patted dry with paper towels
Lemon or lime wedges, for serving (optional)

DIRECTIONS

Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Line a sheet pan with parchment paper or foil for easy cleanup.
In a small bowl, mix the oil, garlic and curry powder. Toss the peppers and onion with 2 tablespoons of the curry oil. Spread in an even layer and sprinkle with salt and pepper.
Set the chicken over the vegetables and rub the remaining curry oil all over the bird and under the breast skin. Sprinkle the chicken all over with salt and pepper.
Roast until the chicken juices run clear when you stab the drumstick with a paring knife, about 35 minutes. If you’d like, squeeze lemon or lime juice all over before serving.

Egg-in-a-Nest Sandwich

Egg-in-a-nest sandwich. The best solo cooking recipes are meant to be prepared one at a time, like this hot sandwich, a cross between egg-in-a-nest and grilled cheese. Food styled by Rebecca Jurkevich. (Linda Xiao/The New York Times)

By Genevieve Ko

An egg cooked in an egg-size hole cut out of butter-sizzled bread feels like a treat. But it’s not quite enough to make a meal. Here, the classic egg-in-a-nest merges with a grilled cheese and a breakfast sandwich into a meal for one that’s meant to be savored leisurely. It’s as delightful with coffee at the beginning of the day as it is in the middle for lunch, or ending it, whether at supper or at midnight. The bread slices — one cradling the egg, the other holding cheese — cook at the same time over relatively low heat so that they end up perfectly golden brown while the egg sets and the cheese melts. If you’d like a little heat, add hot sauce or any chile powder or flakes.

Yield: 1 serving

Total time: 10 minutes

INGREDIENTS

2 slices brioche, challah or sandwich bread
Butter
1 to 2 slices cheddar or other cheese
1 egg
Salt and black pepper
1 to 2 slices ham or cooked bacon (optional)

DIRECTIONS

Using a biscuit cutter or a glass, cut a 2- to 3-inch hole out of the center of one slice of bread.
Melt a pat of butter in a large nonstick or well-seasoned cast-iron skillet over medium-low heat. Add the bread slices and swipe to soak up the butter. Cook until golden, 1 to 2 minutes, then flip. Run a thin pat of butter on the skillet under the whole slice of bread and drop another little pat in the hole of the other slice.
Put the cheese on the whole slice and crack the egg into the hole. Sprinkle salt and pepper over the egg, then cover the skillet, leaving a small gap. Cook until the egg white is set but the yolk is still runny, 2 to 4 minutes. If the bottoms start to brown too much, turn down the heat.
If using, lay the ham or bacon over the cheese. Top the cheese slice with the egg slice, sunny side up, and eat immediately.

This column originally appeared in the New York Times.

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With its striking red brick facade and Victorian Romanesque architecture, the 1890s-era Tilsner Artist Lofts in St. Paul’s Lowertown has drawn a community of creative residents, many of them seniors. The six-story building at Broadway Street and Kellogg Boulevard offers pine floors, exposed brick walls and high ceilings well-suited for 66 income-restricted units of artists to both live and work.

What it’s lacked though, for about a week, is a working elevator.

The Tilsner Building in St. Paul’s Lowertown on Tuesday, May 28, 2024. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

An “elevator outage” notice posted May 22 on the outer elevator doors on each floor indicates the lift would be out of service until May 28. By the end of the workday on Tuesday, however, there had been no visible sign that a vendor or repair crew had paid a visit.

“It will get worked out,” said Barbara McQuillan, executive director of the Twin Cities Housing Development Corporation, the building’s managing general partner, who was hopeful the elevator vendor would have a reprogrammed motherboard installed by early next week. “We’ve ordered the part. We’re looking for an update.”

In interviews, a group of eight disabled residents said it was at least the fourth elevator breakdown in the past year. They pointed to incidents over the past decade where they or loved ones had been trapped, sometimes for hours, or even gotten fingers stuck, excruciatingly, in the malfunctioning door.

“We aren’t being told what’s going on here,” said Lisa Mathieson, a glass blower who has rented a motel room for days because she can’t make it up the stairs to her fifth-floor unit with her walker. “I’m wearing the same clothes I left here with a week ago.”

Barb Rose, a former floral designer who lives on the Tilsner’s top floor, has used a wheelchair or walker since a scooter accident left her with a spinal cord injury in 2022. It takes her 20 minutes to get up all 12 flights of steps with two canes, “and that’s rushing it,” she said. She asked a building manager Tuesday when the Tilsner’s notorious elevator finally would be fixed.

“‘They’re looking for a part, it’s an old elevator,’” Rose said the building manager responded. “This thing has been down since Wednesday. This is more (exercise) than my physical therapist would ever want.”

Rose said she has managed, with much trouble, to make it downstairs for physical therapy appointments, but other disabled residents in the building who rely on wheelchairs and walkers can’t do the same. Olivia Wertheimer, a multi-media artist who uses a cane and suffers from fibromyalgia, said her roommate, who has even less mobility, has not left the apartment in a week.

A reporter’s calls to the building’s management company, MetroPlains Management, were not immediately returned Tuesday. The Tilsner was developed into artist housing in the 1990s by building owners Artspace and the Twin Cities Housing Development Corp.

McQuillan, who runs the latter, said when tenants move in, management “is very clear with them: it’s a one-elevator building, and it’s a six-story building. … Things fail, and things need to be repaired. … We do whatever we can to avoid that, but it happens.”

She said she hoped to hear more from her elevator repair vendor and get better information out to residents by Wednesday morning. Anyone moving out of the building temporarily would have their rent abated for that period, she said.

“We’re expanding the hours of our management staff and will be allowing delivery services to go up to the apartments, which we don’t usually do, so people who have medications or groceries can have them delivered,” she said. “It’s not a situation anybody hopes for.”

Maintenance, management concerns

Residents said the elevator is far from their only concern when it comes to maintenance and management. Around 2016, the building owners began shifting the Tilsner, which had been co-operative rental housing, toward a more traditional, top-down property management arrangement.

With the only elevator in the building broken, Barb Rose, who uses a walker for mobility after suffering a spinal cord injury, starts the climb to her sixth-floor apartment in the Tilsner Building in St. Paul’s Lowertown on Tuesday, May 28, 2024. Rose wears gloves to keep her hands from slipping on the handrails, and it takes her about 20 minutes to climb the stairs. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Despite the Tilsner’s official designation as “Section 42” housing — a federal designation that provides the building owners with an annual low-income housing tax credit — tenants said their rents have risen heavily over the years. A two-bedroom at the Tilsner can run $1,300 to $1,535. Another tenant said she pays $1,600 for her three-bedroom and a $75 parking fee.

Until residents complained, they said, management in recent years began renting units out to non-artists. Drug use and prostitution became problems, and package thefts increased. Rose recalled someone stealing her laundry. Mary Jo DuPaul, a baker, hoped to create a greater sense of community by organizing potluck meals, but the management removed her sign-up sheets from the elevator. Rules around hanging hallway art have become equally onerous, she said, so most walls now are bare.

Among both tenants and managers, “there were a number of people who didn’t care about artists,” DuPaul said.

There are multiple signs the building is being positioned for sale. Tenants seeking lease renewals have learned their leases will be month-to-month beginning June 1 and they soon would be losing basement storage space. A few weeks ago, all tenants were asked to leave their fire extinguishers outside the doors of each of their units. The extinguishers were taken and never returned, though each floor still has at least one in the hallway.

A power outage two weeks ago knocked out the elevator and all stairway, exit, hallway and other common area lights for 15 hours, raising concerns the generator fuel had run dry.

Rose, who spent months hospitalized after her scooter injury in 2022, recalled the bureaucratic ordeal of getting management to install shower grab bars in her bathroom. A property manager brushed past her, quickly inspected her bathroom and declared the shower to be too narrow. A more sympathetic manager advocated for her, and the grab bars soon were installed without issue. The second manager, she said, no longer is on staff.

Elevator drama

But it’s the elevator that has given residents the most immediate and reoccurring pause. In 2016, the elevator was down for more than a month.

Barb Rose, who uses a walker for mobility after suffering a spinal cord injury, takes a breather as she climbs to her sixth-floor apartment in the Tilsner Building on Tuesday, May 28, 2024. The only elevator in the building is broken and it takes Rose about 20 minutes to climb the stairs. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Laurel Cazin, a diabetic who relies on an insulin pump, recalled getting stuck in the elevator for 2 1/2 hours about a year ago. Before freeing her, firefighters were able to toss her hard candy to help keep her blood sugar up. She’s lived at the Tilsner for 30 years and raised a son there.

Her numerous maintenance complaints were responded to in March 2023 with a letter from MetroPlains forbidding her from contacting their management staff directly. The letter states her calls and emails were “accusatory and demanding, impatient, and provide only selective facts and information,” and that even routine maintenance requests would have to be channeled through a caseworker.

Another resident recalled his then-teenage son getting stuck in the elevator for hours alongside three friends. That was in 2014, yet problems persist.

Jennifer Dorris, a 13-year resident, recalled the elevator door closing on her hand for 20 minutes two years ago. The elevator dropped a few feet, paused, and then dropped again, inching toward the basement. She feared her trapped digits would make contact with the floor platform. The pain was excruciating, leading her to believe — wrongly, thankfully — that her fingers had been broken, if not torn off. “I was able to call 911,” she said. “I was screaming and crying.”

Dorris, who recovered without permanent injury, later complained to management, who sent her a legal letter in response. “Their attorney wrote me back saying, ‘This is all staged.’ I didn’t have money to go after them,” Dorris said, “but someday I will.”

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Adding a makeup for a washed-out game in April to the schedule on Tuesday turned out well for the Saints, who lost the first game to Rochester 6-2 but won the second.

In the first game, Rochester stacked up their six runs first. Former Twin Travis Blankenhorn contributed to the Red Wings’ lead with his two-out solo homer in the third inning.

The Saints tried to stage a comeback in the sixth inning, with a single from Michael Helman and an RBI double to center from Matt Wallner, but those two runs weren’t enough and St. Paul fell 6-2.

When the two teams had their last doubleheader almost exactly two months ago, on April 27, the Red Wings won both games at CHS Field. The Saints avoided a repeat in New York, taking the second game 4-1.

St. Paul starter Caleb Boushley allowed a single run in his five innings, walking two and striking out five. Josh Winder added two shutout innings, keeping the Saints’ lead intact.

Game three of the seven-game series in Rochester will be tonight at 5:05 p.m.

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