Risotto! Brilliant stuff. I make it at least weekly with the rice plus anything I have to hand - I’ll usually do it half and half with barley and use either a homemade stock I’ve frozen or a shedload of white wine.
You can put any sort of veg in risotto - rocket or frozen peas or artichoke hearts or whatever, or roasted miscellaneous wrinkled salad drawer remnants, etc. You can do it light and summery or creamy and hearty and it requires absolutely no actual cookery skills whatsoever; if you can pour rice in a pan and ignore it you can make a risotto. Risotto!
If I’ve really run out of everything I’ll do pasta-and-something, or bread using this* recipe, omitting the different flour types. I’ll add herbs from the garden and a bit of olive oil and sea salt over the top and it’s really quite culinary. I’ve even chopped up leftover mushrooms and peppers and folded it into the dough; very nice.
Hummus is my other “nothing in the fridge” recipe - I always have sesame seeds so I can make my own tahini, and it’ll be a cold day in hell when I run out of chickpeas, lemons or garlic. You can have it with the bread above. Tasty.
- Purely because it was the first result I got for “pizza dough” - please don’t think I’m a Jamie Oliver apologist.