Super Cook

Yesterday I came home from grocery shopping, deposited the bags on the floor and got busy with the arduous task of finding homes for it all. I have a fair amount of cabinet space and big, giant chunky draws are in abundance in my charming, if not old kitchen. However, my cabinets are packed full with who knows what; remnants left over from various recipe contest experiments and other foodie adventures that were abandoned for a night at the local Pizza Chef, and rightly so in some cases. My experiments sometimes border on sheer craziness, as do the ingredients I collect to create them.

So before I could put my groceries away I was faced with the job of cleaning out many of these odd ingredients to make room for the more sensible staples. The tuna fish needed a home and the two jars of tahini were taking up unnecessary space. Would I ever use the tahini again?  If I remember correctly, I axed the whole concept of tahini in hummus when I realized that peanut butter made a much better and cheaper ingredient.

Now, being a full time mom has somehow short circuited my brain and making on the spot decisions are hard for me to pull out. So I put the tahini aside in a basket I called "to think about". The basket named ‘throw out/donate' stood nearly empty as the think basket overflowed. Apparently I was not willing to part with these odd yet cherished ingredients after all. Now what? I still had no space and now, twice as much stuff to store.

Somewhere in the back of my mind a voice spoke and it said, "You shouldn't waste food, there are starving people in other countries who would kill for that jar of fish sauce."  Apparently the ghost of my grandmothers voice had come back to haunt me once more, or at bare minimum guilt me into eating all of this stuff. Thanks Nan!

 Did I mention I was creative? Well I am, but not creative enough to clean out a kitchen full of stores and turn them onto the table in fabulous gourmet fashion on a nightly basis. I was going to need help and had a eureka moment when I realized I had bookmarked a website a long time ago and put it into my ‘look at later' file. (Do you all see a procrastinating trend with me? I know!) Anyway, I went and looked at it and just as I had suspected this was to be my glorifying moment into what would become of all of those odd ingredients. This is when the whole debacle turned into...FUN!  

The web site is called SuperCook.  Supercook is a recipe search engine that finds recipes with the ingredients you have laying around. All you do is add your ingredients and recipes pop up for your cooking pleasure. It is a free service, the registration takes just a minute and you are off and running.

I never had so much fun and at times found myself challenging this handy dandy database; "What can you do with let's say, kaffir lime leaves and fish sauce? Ha!" Darn, if that system didn't spit out a recipe for Chicken Fillets with Snow Peas which included both of my odd ingredients and a few others I happened to have and wasn't sure what to do with it. The nice thing is when it spits out a recipe, it lists right there all of the other ingredients you will need. At one point I entered 16 different ingredients and found recipes that only required my needing one more ingredient which I didn't have but could have hubby pick up on his way home. The recipes themselves are drawn from all over the internet; Bon Appétit, Recipe Zarr, All Recipes etc. The recipe results are abundant for sure. My 16 ingredient list yielded over 2000 recipe results yet I didn't have to browse much further than the first ten.

Well, it seems I may thin out my cupboards (freezer and mysterious crisper) after all and have a delicious time doing it! So, what's lurking in your kitchen? Try SuperCook, I bet you get hooked!