I started Table Set for One because of something I noticed.

There are millions of people who, at some point, find themselves cooking for one after a long time cooking for more. A spouse dies. A marriage ends. The last kid leaves for good. And almost overnight, the whole shape of feeding yourself changes — the portions, the grocery cart, the reason to bother.

Almost nobody writes for that person. The recipe sites assume a family of four. The writing about loss and change rarely mentions that you still have to eat, every day, in a kitchen that suddenly feels too quiet. There's a wide gap between those two things, and the people standing in it are mostly on their own.

This publication is for them.

I should be honest about who I am, because it matters. I'm not writing this from the inside of that experience. I haven't lost a spouse. What I have is a close view of it — I've watched someone I love learn to feed herself again after a loss, slowly, over years — and enough respect for how hard it is not to pretend I know it from the inside. So I write as what I actually am: an editor and a publisher who thinks this is worth doing well, and who cares about getting it right for the people it's for.

What that means in practice: the writing here tries to be genuinely useful and genuinely honest, and never to perform a grief it doesn't own. Over time, the truest voices here won't be mine at all — they'll be the readers', the small real things people who are living this write to me and let me share. That's the part I'm most looking forward to.

If you're newly cooking for one, I hope this makes a hard stretch a little easier. That's the whole point of it. If it does, that's the job done.

You can start with the free grocery list, or just read for a while. Either is welcome here.

— Chuck