Eat more vegetables - cook healthy dinners for one.

Use a little custard cup or ramekin, something smallish that won't shatter in the oven. Put a splash of milk and some breadcrumbs in it and carefully break/slide a raw egg in it. The milk should just curl up around the edges of the egg a bit.

Put another smattering of bread crumbs on top, a few dots of butter, some salt and pepper. Bake at 350 degrees. In my toaster oven it took about 14 minutes to cook, but depending on how much milk you use and how deep or shallow your baking dish is, your mileage may vary.

Note that it will continue to cook as you take it out of the oven, so undercook it a bit. Careful, very hot!

Margaret's Cantina, a neighborhood restaurant, serves a great sopa seca special on Tuesdays, cooked in little casseroles. Jeimy and I looked at some recipes and she decided she'd rather make the kind that's more like, well, soup. So here's what we did.

Poach the two split halves of a chicken breast in 6 cups of chicken broth to which you also add three cloves of garlic and two smallish onions minced (or pulverized in the food processor) and sauteed until soft. We also added a can of diced tomatoes with mild chiles in it. I also added about a teaspoon of some "Tequila Lime Seasoning" my son bought at whole foods.

We cooked the chicken long enough to listen to two Songs of the Week, write little stories, and read two chapters of the Sword and the Stone. Then we pulled the chicken off the bones and returned it to the soup.

There was enough left over to freeze one serving and also have some for breakfast tomorrow.

We cut about five tortillas into 1/2 inch strips and sauteed them in a large frying pan with a couple teaspoons of oil until they were almost but not quite crispy.

Dish up the soup and add as many tortilla strips as you like. The more tortilla strips, the "drier" the soup. Mmm!

Pretty much all foods, if you cook them long enough, turn into stew. You can't make stew after work. It takes hours. If you have a slow-cooker you can start it in the morning and it will be done when you get home in the evening.

If you don't want to use a slow-cooker, use a big heavy pot and plan to be around for a few hours so you can poke it and stir it every once in a while. Here's how I made the stew in this picture, which was delicious!

Jane's stew made from vegetables and freezer-burned steak that was more than two years old

This steak was once a nice piece of meat. I defrosted it overnight and then put it in my big pot with about six cups of water and a carton of beef stock. I cooked it for a couple hours, or three, until I figured it was really going to be ok.

So then I chopped up a bunch of onion, garlic, and carrot and sauteed them in a little oil until they were wilted and beginning to brown. I threw them into the simmering pot. Then I sauteed a bunch of shredded cabbage and some sliced mushrooms and threw them in the pot. I also added a can of diced tomatoes.

So not only was this soup wonderful, but today I made my dinner of leftover soup even better by chopping the rest of my head of cabbage and microwaving it for six minutes, then sauteeing it briefly in a little oil and then stirring in the rest of the stew. This way the proportion of vegetable to stew increased dramatically!

I discovered that using the previous technique - microwaving and then sauteeing a big batch of vegetables and then mixing them in to something else - is a great way to use a frozen tv dinner, or a can of prepared soup. If you think of the prepared food as a SAUCE and your vegetables as the main ingredient, you end up with something healthy and mostly fresh.