Supercook: Finding recipes for the contents of your pantry
Posted
Jun 23 2008, 10:00 PM
by
Karen Datko
You're a frugal shopper, so part of your emergency fund is a stash of food in your pantry and freezer. But what if you're getting down to the dregs and can't figure out a meal to make from this stuff. Or maybe you have a recipe in mind, but you're lacking two key ingredients.
This is when a new recipe search engine, Supercook, becomes your friend. You type in the ingredients you have on hand and the site produces recipes that fit.
Supercook isn't all-inclusive. We typed in desperation foods like beef jerky and those smoked oysters that come in a can, and didn't get any results. "Pancake mix" also wasn't on the list of available options. Of course, all you really have to do there is add water.
But when we typed in pita and parmesan cheese, we got a recipe for parmesan pita crisps, and also a reminder that we'd also need olive oil. We typed in "k" and found, among other things, Rice Krispies and kangaroo.
For best results, you're supposed to list everything you have in your kitchen. Since we went food shopping Sunday, to save time we limited our list to: parmesan, olive oil, garlic, pasta and bacon. Supercook immediately produced six recipes that require no additional ingredients (and they look great), and a whole lot more that need only one extra item.
By adding red pepper flakes to our list, we learned that the search engine isn't infallible. It produced a couple recipes that require whole red peppers; it apparently thought one could be substituted for the other. (Picking substitutions is another cool feature of Supercook.) Even after we clicked on "red pepper flakes" to indicate that a substitution was not desired, we got a similar result. But hey, no biggie. With a little common sense, anyone can figure this out.
The Web site says Supercook was created by self-trained software developer Assaf Rozenblatt, who also was the brain power behind Brainboost.com. If you want to save your recipes, you have to sign up, but it's free.
