Make meals with what you have

#Middlebury #Meals

I learned of a neighborhood group, six seniors who are trying to keep themselves fed against all odds. They’ve come up with a brilliant plan: At the end of each week, they pool whatever foods they have left over and have dinner together. They split the leftovers to take home.

The woman who told me about this talked about a website she discovered where all manner of ingredients could be entered, with the machine scouting the internet for recipes that could be created using those ingredients. Whoever created the SuperCook website (www.supercook.com) did a fantastic job. Meats, grains, fruits, vegetables, dozens of cheeses, nuts, spices, dairy substitutes – it’s all there, ready to be clicked. You only need to scroll down the left side and select the ingredients you have on hand.

I tried it out, clicking that I have butter, milk, onion, ground beef and rice. The result came back that I could make a potential 521 recipes. Some of them actually sounded pretty good. When I swapped the ground beef for bacon, it was even better. A little suggestion note at the top of the screen said that if I had certain other ingredients on hand, I could find an additional 51 recipes.

Another website, My Fridge Food (myfridgefood.com), offers the same thing, although on a more limited basis. There’s even a phone app, and when you click on a recipe it tells you the cooking time, calories and serving size of each recipe.

Once I found those two sites I went on a hunt for more and found a public library database titled “Finding Recipes for Ingredients You Already Have.” You can check it out at www.penningtonlibrary.org/finding-recipes-for-ingredients-you-already-have.

Maybe you don’t need another trip to the grocery store, at least not yet. Maybe you have on hand what you need to make a meal once you find a creative recipe.

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