You are standing in front of an open fridge with half a cabbage, three chicken thighs, coriander that has about a day left, and no plan.

So you type “what can I cook with what I have” into your phone. You find a site that wants you to tick your ingredients from a list of two thousand, and a chatbot that suggests a harissa and preserved lemon traybake.

Neither has answered the question. You did not want a recipe. You wanted dinner, from this fridge, in the next forty minutes.

“What can I cook with what I have” is the wrong question

Taken literally it is enormous. You have flour, salt, three kinds of vinegar, a jar of capers and some frozen peas. The honest answer is thousands of things, which is why every tool built around that question hands you back a wall of results.

The question you are actually asking is much smaller. What can I make tonight, from the things that will otherwise go in the bin, without going to the shop?

You are not short of options. You are short of a way to cut them down to three.

Everything below is about cutting them down. The cooking part is genuinely easy once the list is short enough to hold in your head.

Why ingredient-matching apps stall in week two

Sites like Supercook do a real thing well: you tick what is in your kitchen, and it filters a very large recipe database to the dishes you can already make. It is free, and if you enjoy browsing recipes it is a good afternoon.

The trouble is the ticking. Building the pantry the first time takes several minutes, which is already longer than opening the fridge and looking.

And then you cook. The eggs are gone, the cabbage is gone, someone finished the rice. Unless you go back and untick all of that, the tool is now confidently suggesting meals you cannot make. By the second week most people have quietly stopped updating it, which turns a clever filter into a recipe site with extra steps.

Start with six things, not the whole kitchen

Open the fridge and take out only what will not survive the week. Not what you own. What is on the clock.

For most households that is somewhere between four and eight items, and it takes about forty seconds. Say them out loud if it helps. Half a cabbage, three thighs, the coriander, two eggs, yesterday’s rice, a tub of yoghurt going over.

That short list is the entire problem. Everything else in the kitchen is a supporting actor that will still be there on Saturday, so it does not need deciding about tonight.

The order things die in

If you only remember one thing from this page, make it this order. Cooking down the list rather than up it is most of what separates a household that wastes food from one that does not.

1. Fresh herbs and salad leaves. Four good days, then gone in an afternoon.
2. Soft fruit, and anything already cooked.
3. Fish, then mince.
4. Milk, yoghurt, soft cheese.
5. Hard vegetables, eggs, hard cheese. These will wait for you.

Households in high-income countries throw away around 81 kg of food per person per year, according to the UN Environment Programme’s Food Waste Index Report 2024 (Table 3, covering 2022; checked 11 September 2026). Very little of that is thrown away on purpose. It is bought, forgotten, and found.

Five dish shapes that absorb almost anything

Here is the part the listicles skip. You do not need a recipe for this kind of cooking, because you need a shape, and there are only about five worth knowing.

Each one is a formula with slots. Put what you have into the slots.

Take the six things and ask which shapes they fit. Cabbage, thighs and a tin of tomatoes is a traybake. Rice, eggs and the same cabbage is fried rice. Yoghurt and coriander is the sauce on top of either.

Two answers from five shapes and six ingredients, and neither of them required looking anything up.

Match against meals you already cook

The reason a recipe generator disappoints at six o’clock is that it is optimising for novelty when you are optimising for finishing.

A dish you have cooked before has no unknowns in it. You know it takes forty minutes and not ninety, you know your children will eat it, and you know which corners you can cut. A dish you have never cooked has all three of those risks on a Tuesday evening.

This is where keeping a rotation of about twenty meals your household genuinely eats pays off twice. It makes Sunday planning quick, and it gives tonight something to match against. Six ingredients against twenty known meals returns two or three answers. Six ingredients against the internet returns three hundred.

If your recipes are currently spread across screenshots, a cookbook shelf and three browser tabs, that is the thing worth fixing first. Getting them into one place you can actually search is what turns them into something a tool can match against.

Handle the one missing ingredient properly

Most nights, one of your two or three answers is nearly right and needs a single thing you have not got. This is the moment the whole plan usually collapses.

Three ways out, in the order you should try them.

• Substitute. Most missing items have an obvious stand in. Yoghurt for cream, any vinegar for lemon, frozen for fresh, almost any hard cheese for any other.
• Drop it. A garnish is a garnish. A dish rarely fails for want of parsley.
• Put it on the list and cook something else. The point of writing it down is that it gets bought once, rather than blocking dinner twice.

That third one matters more than it looks. A missing ingredient that goes onto a list the rest of the house can see gets picked up by whoever passes a shop. A missing ingredient in your head gets discovered again next Tuesday, at ten past six, in front of the same open fridge.

The seven things that make this work every time

Cooking from what you have is much easier if a few reliable things are always there. Not a full store cupboard. Seven items.

• Eggs. Dinner on their own, and the glue in half the shapes above.
• Tinned tomatoes and tinned pulses. Body and substance from a cupboard.
• A bag of rice and a bag of pasta.
• Frozen peas and frozen spinach. The vegetables that never go off.
• Onions and garlic. The start of most things.
• Something salty and strong. Anchovies, soy, stock cubes, parmesan, miso. This is what makes improvised food taste deliberate.
• An acid. Lemons or any vinegar. It is what a dish is missing when you cannot tell what a dish is missing.

With those seven in the house, six random fridge items almost always add up to a meal. Without them, the same six items are a puzzle.

When a free ingredient search is the better answer

Worth saying plainly. If you do not keep your own recipes and do not want to, a free ingredient-search site is the right tool and costs nothing. Tick what you have, browse what comes back, cook something new. Plenty of people enjoy exactly that, and an app that only knows your own meals cannot offer it.

The case for matching against your own recipes is the weeknight case: you are tired, the answer needs to arrive in under a minute, and it needs to be something you can cook without reading. Those are different jobs, and it is fine to use one tool for the weekend and none at all on a Wednesday.

Common questions