When I'm cooking for myself, I cook mostly vegetarian. It's cheaper and easier, and meat is slimy. I've decided to cook meat only for special occasions, but I'll eat it whenever it's served to me. I sometimes use chicken/beef broth or (rarely) bacon to help flavor an otherwise meatless dish. So I'm not a true vegetarian, but I do a lot of vegetarian cooking.
Since my fridge is so small, I usually make up a big batch of something and eat it for dinner every day until it's gone. The true test of a good recipe is whether I still like it after eating it for a week.
I don't have room in my fridge to keep vegetables unless I have plans to use them. However, I always keep carrot and celery sticks. The carrots I cut up and store in a plastic bag; the celery I cut up and stand in plastic glasses with some water at the bottom of the glass. I often eat two or three heads of celery in a week. Yum.
I keep lots and lots of fruit, and I eat at least 3 pieces a day--sometimes more. I buy fruit based on what's cheap and in season. In the summer, it's mainly peaches and nectarines; in the winter, it's mainly apples and pears. I tend to go for fruit that can be stored on the counter, because there's no room in my fridge.
As for creating recipes, I usually start by reading three or four recipes online for what I want to cook. Then I take the parts I like best of each recipe, and I blend them together. After I finish cooking, if I like it, I write down the recipe so that I can make it again in the future.
I'm learning a lot about cheap meat substitutes, such as dried soybeans, soynuts, TVP (textured vegetable protein), and seitan. I've also been experimenting with unusual grains, such as kasha (buckwheat groats), bulgur, barley, and quinoa; and I sometimes try to enrich recipes with wheat bran or oat bran.
