How to cook dinner from what's already in your fridge

Most recipe sites start with a dish and hand you a shopping list. On a normal weeknight that is backwards: the food is already in your fridge, and the question is what it can become. Our search is built around that question. Here is how to get the most out of it.

Start with what needs using up

Open the fridge and name the things that matter: the half pack of chicken thighs, the bag of spinach that will not last another two days, the last three eggs. Add them to the ingredient list first. These are the ingredients the search tries to build dinner around, so put the ones you most want to use at the top of your mind, not the ones that happen to be easy to type.

You do not need to add salt, black pepper, water, sugar, olive oil or vegetable oil. We treat those as pantry staples that almost every kitchen has, so a recipe is never marked as missing them.

Tell us what to leave out

Exclusions are just as useful as ingredients. If someone at the table does not eat mushrooms, or you simply do not want fish tonight, add it to the exclude list. Recipes that contain an excluded ingredient are removed from the results completely, and an excluded ingredient is never offered as a substitute for something else.

Read the three groups

Results are split by how close you are to cooking:

• Cook now — everything the recipe really needs is already on your list or in the pantry staples.
• Missing 1 — one ingredient short. Often that is something you can pick up on the way home or swap for what you have.
• Missing 2+ — good ideas for the weekend or the next shopping trip.

"Really needs" matters here. Every recipe line is marked by how important it is to the dish. Core and important ingredients count toward what is missing; a garnish or an optional topping does not. A recipe that is only missing a garnish is still a cook-now recipe.

Let substitutions close the gap

When a recipe is one ingredient short, check whether you can swap it. If you have Greek yogurt and the recipe wants sour cream, or you have shallots and it wants onion, that swap may already count as covered. We only use a substitute when it suits how the ingredient is cooked in that particular recipe, so a swap that works in a salad is not automatically offered for something that gets fried.

Open a recipe to see which lines you have, which are missing, and what could replace them. If you apply a swap, keep in mind that the calories and nutrition shown are still for the original recipe; we do not recalculate them after a substitution yet.

Narrow it down only when you need to

Once you have a shortlist, filters help you pick: time, calories, protein, cuisine, meal type or diet. Add them after you see the results, not before. Starting with too many filters is the fastest way to end up with nothing. If a combination is too strict, the search suggests which constraint to relax to get more recipes back.

A quick routine

1. Add three to five ingredients you want to use up.
2. Exclude anything that is off the table tonight.
3. Look at Cook now first, then Missing 1.
4. Open a recipe, check the missing line and any possible swap.
5. Start cooking.

The less you shop for a single dinner, the less ends up in the bin at the end of the week.