I cannot estimate recipe change proportions and it sucks

This evening I made the famous eggplant stew that I've written about at least a thousand times, conservatively, here. Planned on using three eggplants first, that seemed like a LOT, so chopped up just one and pan fried it. It didn't seem as much, so I added another eggplant. That seemed like a decent amount of eggplants to put in a couple of cans of chopped tomatoes and tomato paste, and like six slices of dried lime.

Now it feels like it's tomato sauce, for pasta and as such, that's been thickened with eggplants. Not that I might, the umami kick from the eggplants is awesome, the sugar and lime cuts into the strange 'grassy' smell of the vegetable. It's well cooked, the onions are still crispy enough that there's some bite to them but cooked well enough that you can't identify them individually. The garlic -- I used all the garlic that was available in the house -- gives a nice background hint, without overwhelming the dish. Like I like my garlic to do, usually. I'm hoping when it cools down and is stored, and eaten with rice for the next longfuckingtime because I made a lottt of it, it tastes more like eggplants. Either way though, it's a win, I like tomatoes, I like eggplants.

This is about how I cannot upscale recipe. I look at a recipe and think, I need to make it slightly more so it lasts me two meals. Then I realize if I leave out one of the raw ingredients cut and unused, it'll go to waste. So the rest of the dish is upscaled to completely use up whatever raw ingredient it is. Which means I need to cut twice as much of everything else, and at this point I'm making thrice as much as the original recipe.

By the time I'm done, and it takes me two hours even though the recipe says it's a 45-minute dish because I muddled around with the ingredients, I'm not hungry because the entire thing's made me cry those goddamn sharp onions. I'm tired of standing up working for two hours, and I've smelt so much of the dish there's absolutely no desire to eat it. So I steal my roommates' dinner, use my sauce as a sauce for the pasta, and get done with a truncated meal. While there's enough stew in the large pressure for at least five days of lunch and dinner.  Really need to sell my roommates and friends of the house on helping me finish it. Wasting food is bad, it's awful for the environment, yadayadayada, so I can't make myself throw anything away. Two weeks of eating the same base sauce with all sorts of carbs it is for me then.

And that's the problem with cooking for one also, when you cook it just for yourself for a few meals the other ingredients are wasted, when you cook a large batch you're stuck with the same goop for weeks to an end. I don't mind honestly, if it's been cooked well and doesn't taste terrible, you do get to know the dish intimately, so you can make modifications in the future. Throughout the time though, there's very little excitement and you get made fun of.

Either way, I'm excited about my eggplant stew, made thrice as much as the recommended amount, and looking forward to eating it in combination with all sorts of carbs.