Cooking rec: Supercook.com

[breakinglight11]

I've been using this great website a lot lately by the name of Supercook. It's a recipe database of sorts, but not the typical one. You type in all the random ingredients you have in your house, and it searches through the Internet for what recipes will make the most efficient use of them. You can even choose which ingredients to prioritize, so that you can narrow the suggestions to your taste.

This website is great for me because I have a tendency to buy ingredients for a specific dish and not know what to do with the rest of it once that dish is cooked. Despite it being an old problem for me, I've just never managed to get the trick of planning meals more than just a day or two at once, so I spend a lot of time staring at bits and bobs in the fridge and cupboard not knowing what do with them. I also tend to cook with specific dishes in mind, so I'm not very good at thinking the other way around, starting from the ingredients and working forward, rather than starting with a dish and working back. But it's helped me make much better use of things before they go bad when I can survey my kitchen, enter them into Supercook, and make whatever it pops up.

I still mean to learn how to meal plan better. (On top of all the other things I plan to improve about myself.) But this helps me make up for that deficiency until then.  

Comments

[laurion]

Very cool. AllRecipes.com has something similar.

[lisefrac.livejournal.com]

I've been wanting there to be something like this for a while! I'll have to try it out.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

I appreciate that you can enter 20 or 30 ingredients, and the results aren't limited to recipes that use all of them at once. But I still found it frustrating to page through dozens of recipes for roasted garlic (and grilled garlic, and baked garlic) and dozens more for plain white rice. Is there a way around that effect, or is it just worth it to you?

[breakinglight11.livejournal.com]

I find that when you select a couple of ingredients for it to focus on (by clicking on them) it filters out stuff like that. Give that a try, see if it makes it easier.