What should I make for dinner? A three-question answer

"What should I make for dinner?" is a decision problem, not a recipe problem. Searching for "dinner ideas" makes it worse: millions of results, all of them possible, none of them obviously right. The fix is to cut the options down before you look at a single recipe.

The three questions that decide dinner

1. How much time and energy do I have? Be honest. "Twenty minutes, one pan" rules out nine in ten recipes immediately — which is the point.
2. What needs using up? The half bag of spinach, the chicken thighs dated tomorrow. Dinner is for them; the rest of the meal supports them.
3. Who is eating? The vegetarian, the child who eats nothing green, the person home late. One sentence each, and the shortlist shrinks again.

With those three answers you are not choosing from every recipe in the world. You are choosing from three or four — and that is a decision you can make while the pan heats.

How to do it in ChefBook

1. Open What Should I Cook. It is ChefBook's free dinner wizard. It starts from your kitchen, not from a search box, and it is plain ingredient matching, not AI.
2. Tick what you have. Pick the ingredients at home — start with whatever needs using up first.
3. Choose dinner and set your limits. Set the meal type to dinner, then the cuisine, how much time you have, the difficulty and any dietary needs.
4. Pick from the top of the list. Results come back ranked by ingredient match, as a percentage, so the first few are the ones you can cook without going to the shops.
5. Start cooking, or plan it. Open the recipe and start, or add it to the meal plan for tomorrow and send any missing items to your grocery list.

What to make for dinner tonight: 10 cupboard fallbacks

When even three questions feel like too many, these need almost nothing fresh:

1. Eggs in tomato sauce (shakshuka) — tinned tomatoes, onion, eggs, bread.
2. Fried rice — yesterday's rice, eggs, frozen peas, soy sauce.
3. Pasta with garlic and oil — spaghetti, garlic, olive oil, chilli flakes, parmesan if you have it.
4. Quesadillas — tortillas, cheese, tinned beans, anything left in the fridge.
5. A frittata — eggs and whatever vegetables are going soft.
6. Lentil soup — red lentils, onion, stock, cumin.
7. Tuna pasta — tinned tuna, pasta, lemon, capers or sweetcorn.
8. Chickpea curry — tinned chickpeas, tinned tomatoes, curry paste, rice.
9. Baked potatoes — with beans, cheese or leftover chilli.
10. Noodle soup — noodles, stock, an egg, frozen greens.

Keeping a short list like this saved as a cookbook means the fallback is one tap away. If you want more ideas, browse the dinner recipes on Explore.

Why the wizard beats a search box

A search box needs you to know what you want. The wizard only needs you to know what you have. It ranks recipes from your own library and the community's by how much of each recipe you can already make, so "what should I make for dinner?" becomes "which of these three?". For the ingredient side in more depth, see what to cook with the ingredients you have.