When choosing what to cook next, prioritize perishables. The stuff that’s going to go bad quickly. Berries are at the top of the list, followed by Meats, Fleshy Fruit & Vegetables (tomatoes, mango, peppers) and Milk, and then Eggs & Hard Vegetables (potatoes, squash, radish, etc.)
If it's in the fridge, it's on a timer. If it's in the freezer, you've got a lot more time.
But FR! What if I don’t know any recipes that use what I have?
Go hunting, you beautiful bastard~ https://www.supercook.com
Supercook allows you to list off all the ingredients you have on-hand, and it will find recipes which use ONLY those ingredients.
If you make an account, it should save your ‘Pantry’ list, so you can come back to it again later.
There’s a bunch of ‘Use what I have to make recipes!’ guides on the internet, but I love how granular ‘Supercook’ gets, and how it doesn’t ask you to pay to use its database.
You can enter a ‘Key Ingredient’ to focus on using up something (Like if you’ve got too much celery and need to use a lot, quickly) - AND you can select what type of dish you want to make (Main dish, side dish, dessert, etc.) so you can quickly filter out the billion cookie or sweetbread recipes.
It also tells you WHAT you’re missing, so you can tell at a glance if it’s something you actually don’t have, or if it’s something you just forgot to add to the list.
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Write Down the recipes you love so you can always find it - even if the site ever goes down or that recipe gets removed.
If I’ve learned anything from watching the Internet evolve, it’s that you can NEVER trust a website to continue hosting your shit into eternity. They always die eventually.
Save your important shit as a physical object that you can hold in your hand.
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If you have a LOT of perishable vegetables that are reaching the limit of their lifespan, that’s when you make soup or stir-fry.
IN CONCLUSION:
Prioritize Perishables
Use Supercook to find recipes to use up stuff that might go bad soon, or ingredients you have a lot of.
Write down the recipes you like to save them foreverrrr
Thanks to @notenoughtogivebread for sending me the recipe from one of her vegetarian cookbooks. I tweaked it a little, but it's still all thanks to her. She also gave me tips for working with puff pastry.
Technically not syn free, but low syn, and lovely for breakfast. Peanut butter cookies!
What you’ll need:
peanut butter
sweetener
salt
Blended oats
Preheat the oven to gas mark 6. Put two tablespoons of peanut butter into a bowl with a cup of blended oats, an add a pinch of sweetener and salt. If you aren’t dieting you can put chocolate chips in too. Stir into a doughy ball.
Rip about the size of a teaspoon off, and roll it in your hand, before squishing it into a flat shape and putting it onto a buttered, or oiled tray. Repeat until all of the dough has been used up.
Cook for 10 minutes, and serve with chocolate sauce, jam or even more peanut butter!
That moment when you look around your kitchen and realize that you made two loaves of zucchini-blueberry bread, three loaves of zucchini-chocolate chip bread, a pan of brownies, meat lasagna, spinach lasagna, co’bubble, and refrigerator pickles... And cleaned up/put everything away.
...
I’m an actual responsible adult. When did that happen?
