Takeout

It's impossible for me to go to the grocery store and buy ingredients to make a meal found in any cookbook for one person and save money. It's always cheaper to walk to the Chinese takeout and pay $6 for some chicken with snow peas than it is to shop for your own stuff. It's not the snow peas or chicken that are too expensive. It's the four kinds of oil and seasonings that cost $10 per bottle. But sometimes only a home-cooked meal will do, so you'll go out and spend $50 buying everything for your dinner. It's never as good as it is from the takeout place since they load your food with MSG and all kinds of terrible-for-you secret ingredients. Then even worse, the next night you want dinner again, and when you look at your ingredients you discover that the only thing you can make with these four kinds of oil and seasonings is chicken and snow peas, and you probably have some of those leftover too. Then you end up making the exact same meal over and over until you never want to eat it again. It's better to just get over the hunger for home-cooked and get the takeout.