ChefBookThe question is not "what recipes exist". The internet has that covered, exhaustively. The question is "what can I cook right now, with this" — and almost nothing answers that, because search engines match words, not the contents of your shelves.
Why searching recipes doesn't solve this
- Search runs the wrong way round. You type "chicken recipes" and get a million results, most of which need six things you do not have.
- Every result costs a shopping trip. A recipe you cannot cook tonight is not a recipe, it is homework.
- It ignores your constraints. Forty minutes, one pan, no nuts, vegetarian for one of you.
- It ignores what is dying. The spinach is the whole reason you are cooking, and search does not know it exists.
How to do it in ChefBook
- Open What Should I Cook. It is ChefBook's built-in wizard for exactly this moment — it starts from your kitchen, not from a search box.
- Tell it what you have. Add the ingredients on your shelves — chicken, lemon, rice, spinach. Tap them from the common list or search for them. Put in what is about to go off first; that is what you want used.
- Set your constraints. Choose cuisine, meal type, how much time you actually have, difficulty, and any dietary needs. This is where "30 minutes, vegetarian, nothing complicated" gets honoured.
- Get results ranked by match. ChefBook returns recipes ordered by how well they fit what you already own — so the top results are things you can start cooking now, not things that need a supermarket run.
- Cook it or plan it. Open Cook Mode and start, or drop it into this week's meal plan. If a suggestion needs one or two extra items, send just those to your grocery list.
Use it on Thursday, not just at 6pm. Running the wizard against what is left mid-week is the single most effective way to cut food waste — you cook the wilting things on purpose instead of finding them later.
It works better the more you save
The wizard matches against your own library as well as the wider recipe collection, so the more recipes you import — from blogs, from Instagram, from your family's cards — the more the answers look like food you actually eat.
This is the quiet compounding benefit of keeping recipes in one place: a pile of recipes is a chore, but an indexed pile of recipes is a menu that reads your fridge.
Do this in about a minute
ChefBook is free on the App Store and Google Play — import your first recipe today.