Single-person households are the fastest-growing census category in the United States, even though clueless politicians and cookbook publishers continue to ignore us.

But not Joe Yonan, the food editor for the Washington Post who writes an award-winning food column called “Cooking for One.”

In his new book “Serve Yourself: Nightly Adventures in Cooking for One” (Ten Speed Press, $22), Yonan offers a wide range of recipes for folks who live alone but still love food and like to cook, even if it’s not for a crowd. Having company over? It’s so much easier to double one of these recipes-for-one than to scale down something that serves six to eight.

Yonan includes a section on eggs, one on tacos, and others on pizza and sandwiches. But many of the dishes are elegant enough for a dinner party: sweet potato and orange soup with smoky pecans; cornish hen with cherry-hazelnut wine sauce; mahi mahi with kiwi-avocado salsa and coconut rice; gingery glazed halibut with carrots and baby bok choy; Thai fried rice with runny egg; and a blueberry lemon tart with toasted coconut.

Scattered throughout the book are interesting essays about what it was like for Yonan to eat on his own in Paris, and his experience killing a chicken at his sister’s North Berwick farm. An ode to chicken-fried steak will have you rethinking this heart-stopper.

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