One great cookbook: Anita Lo's 'Solo'

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Endless cookbooks feature only recipes that serve four people. It is a strange immutability of the cookbook industry that no author, nor editor, nor publisher questions. Smack in the middle of the 20th century having a recipe serve mom, dad, Jenny and Johnny made good nuclear-family sense. There are no longer definitively that many mouths to feed in a household. Sometimes you throw a party and need to feed a precise bazillion guests; sometimes you have a lone diner — you — eager to feast on a smart, simple meal.

Anita Lo's book of meals for one person, "Solo: A Modern Cookbook for a Party of One," is the wondrous, utilitarian text for those aspirations of delicious self-sufficiency.

Armed for ongoing cooking success

Lo, the chef-owner of the beloved and now-shuttered Manhattan restaurant Annisa, might not seem an ideal guide to the world of solo cooking. Chefs, you imagine, cannot cook for anything less than a full dining room. Lo counters that argument in the first sentence of the book. "I put the 'lo' in 'solo.' The A Lo in 'alone.' I've been dumped almost as many times as I've been in relationships," said Lo. She knows from feeding herself. Being a chef, she will always do with so aplomb. She cannot help her chef-self. 

To assist non-professionals in doing the same, Lo built "Solo" with a nearly 20-page appendix. It is a roadmap to assembling a pantry: what goes where in the fridge, the right equipment for the smallest kitchens and how to employ your freezer like a virtuoso. 

Lo is a global-minded chef, so her recommended pantry swerves from bonito flakes to harissa to masa harina. Yet, she notes, these are tiered-up options. Before she dives into those, she provides a graph of the truest pantry essentials, like onions, tomatoes and sesame oil. Start small; grow into wide. 

The equipment section is an individual-minded eye-opener. She notes the economical firepower of a vacuum sealer, identifying its ability to extend the life of frozen items and even chips. She says, "it's great for brown sugar, so you don't get that unusable-brown-brick effect." Lo trumpets Lilliputian equipment: 1-quart pots; an immersion blender in place of a behemoth; a toaster oven in lieu of a conventional one. 

The freezer plan is an exercise in cunning strategy. She teaches you to FIFO, in which the first items in the freezer are the first items out. Like ingredients are stored with like ingredients in the various parts of the freezer. Items are frozen in manageable portions. Her chef mind also shares a trick for working your way decisively through everything in the freezer: Create a chart that tracks the item, add the date it was put in the freezer, and then, as you cook the portions of said item over time, you note the decreasing number of portions available. Chef obsessiveness put to intelligent home-cook use. 

A recipe for every lone craving

Sound advice on how to prepare for cooking is handy; it is the quality of the recipes that matter when you are bent on fending for and feeding yourself. Across the seven chapters of "Solo," Lo grabs you by the hand and yanks you across the globe. 

As an adept chef should, Lo highlights the possibilities of vegetables, exploiting them in main course iterations. Smoky eggplant and scallions are loaded into a frittata. Broccoli rabe is whirred into a pesto then lobbed on toast with segments of charred clementines. Twice-cooked sweet potatoes are topped with kale, mushrooms and parmesan. This is vegetable cooking that inspires as it satiates. 

Her way with starches dip from gnocchi with mortadella and peas to glass noodles with squid and pork. Meat dishes, like a pan-roasted chicken breast with caramelized onions and bacon to Korean-style pork spareribs, likewise veer from Europe to Asia. 

Fear not: desserts are welcomed, encouraged and glorified. Lo's versatile crumble topping appears in varied guises: a salted butterscotch pie, a Meyer lemon pie, a fruit crumble. Because cooking for one is no drudgery. It deserves to be a sweet celebration of self-reliant abundance.