I really enjoy the recipe threads in this section, as I do very much enjoy cooking, and food in general (by all logic, I should really weigh at least twice what I do now). However, my epicurean adventures are almost always limited by two things:
I am usually cooking for just me
I generally have a fairly random assortment of ingredients available
Now, #1 is pretty easily addressed by modifying amounts of ingredients and/or figuring on having an abundance of tasty leftovers after the fact. #2 is really the one that gets me.
What I would love to find (and really hope exists) is a recipe site that would let me plug in the food items I have available and tell me what delicious things I can make with said limited ingredients. Does anyone know if there is a site that exists that can help me here?
All Recipes allows searching by ingredient, and has fairly simple recipes. Pay attention to the ratings; the recipes are user-submitted, I think, and some are better than others.
Not bad. Not bad at all. It does take a little bit of secondary searching (i.e. plug in the “Ingredients I Want”, then revise the search based on the results to reflect the “Ingredients I Don’t Want”), but overall that is exactly the sort of thing that I was looking for.
What you need is a food version of the “In My Bar” feature at webtender.com. It lets you list all the booze and mixers you have and gives you a list of drinks you can make.
Epicurious is a damn fine web site, I agree. But, for purposes of this thread, they don’t really have the search capabilities that I seek. Cowgirl Jules mentioned one place that is pretty close, and OpalCat mentioned another that reallly does have the search function I’m looking for, but it is really just for drinks.
For the folks that mentioned it, Google has served pretty well in my quest for kitchen kickassery. But, I guess what I really want is something more focused…
I’m looking. There’s one I used to have where you clicked on everything that’s in your pantry and fridge and it would pull up suggestions—no need to run to the store.
I also like recipezaar.com. You can search by the ingredients, cooking time, prep time, low fat, etc. It’s very versatile and there are a lot of GREAT recipes on there.
I think the difference here is that that will tend to bring up recipes that use all of those ingredients, or something. I think what is wanted is more like “here’s what is in my kitchen, what are the possibilities?” Epicurious is good for stuff like “what can I make with an onion, some mushrooms, and some sherry;” what would be ideal is something that’s the equivalent of someone’s good-cook-mom coming and looking through your cupboards and going “hmmm… you cold use that and that and make this, or those and some of this and make that, or…” (which is pretty much what that drink site I linked to does)
Ideal: site with most common foods available in a list that can be checked off, maybe with some “add your own” capabilities
Not ideal: listing all 80 things in your fridge and cabinets into Google or epicurious and doing a search
I’ve found a couple of great non-food recipes on this site, but I guess I need to look at the food recipes, too.
My problem when searching for recipes is trying to find one for something that’s often an ingredient in other recipes. For instance, if I try to search for a recipe for mayonnaise, it gives me every single recipe that has mayonnaise as an ingredient, which is thousands of recipes. I wish Epicurious or AllRecipes had a way to search only for the title of the recipe.