My husband was rather surprised to be offered ‘bottom of the fridge sauce’ with pasta the other day. I know his mother always had a menu plan for the week, so I suppose he’d never come across this particular delicacy before.
My new resolution for the year is to avoid waste, and (obviously!) this pasta sauce was made with the things lurking in the vegetable drawers in my fridge. It was great, but perhaps I need to work on the marketing …
For years I’ve wanted a recipe book or site that I could ask “what can I cook with what I have in the fridge?” And here it is!
I love this!
At Cookthink, you can ask for:
- recipes that fit your ingredient (yay – two going-soft peppers, anyone? They suggest sauteed bell peppers with pine nuts and parmesan, or an aubergine, pepper and basil caponata, or …)
- recipes that fit a particular dish (if you’re looking for a dessert, or fancy a risotto or …)
- recipes from a particular cuisine (if you fancy turkish, for example)
- or recipes that fit a particular mood (e.g. healthy, special occasion, gooey or brittle or … what looks like hundreds of different moods)
And any combination of these four main types (and multiple ingredients).
They will come up with one suggestion, but if that’s not quite right, there are many more recipes that fit your requirements.
Now then, the key question is how do they cope with gluten-free? Oddly, this counts as a ‘mood’, but once you know that, you can ask for gluten free recipes – and there are lots. I asked for a gluten free dessert, and they offered me roasted pears with caramel, creme fraiche and pistachios. Sound good?
It isn’t quite perfect yet. It is tiresome to have to keep refreshing to look for the one adjective that fits what you want, particularly since they are randomly generated and it’s easy to click past the one you want and have to wait for ages for it to randomly reappear – I’d prefer to scroll forwards and back across the tag cloud to see what I want. Also, adding items in the box at the bottom doesn’t seem to work. But the idea is great, and they do say it is beta.
Go and explore – I think it is well worth it. I’m going to cook the pears for my sister-in-law later this week, I think …
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I’ve written a book summarising what we’ve learnt over 20 years of dealing with the gluten free diet, and it might be just what you’re looking for. It packs the lessons we’ve learned into what I hope is a helpful and straightforward guidebook. It’s available on Amazon, as a paperback or for your Kindle… |
Hi Lucy. Thanks for review of Cookthink. We’ve had a lot of fun building (and using) the site. We’re always really happy to hear what people like and don’t like about the site.
It is odd to have “health” and “diet” tags lumped into the mood tab. We’re working on a re-design of the tool so that we can more intuitively group the search tags.
In the meantime, if you know which tags you want to use — “gluten-free,” for example — you don’t need to keep refreshing. You can just type it into the tool’s search bar and then hit return (or press the “+” sign to the right of the search bar). That will move the search tag over to the orange “I’m craving:” box. You can add up to 8 tags to “cookthink” (though at this point, because of the size of our database, the more tags you add, the lower your chances of getting something that satisfies all of your search tags.)
Great idea on just being able to scroll forwards and backwards through the tag. We’ll definitely put that in the re-design mix.
Thanks again! Once you’ve had more time to explore, we’d love to hear how it’s working for you. I’m at chip at cookthink dot com.
Hi chip! Thanks for explaining – I thought there must be an easier way. Guess I failed the user-testing, then(!)
One of the other things I particularly like about this site but didn’t mention above is the ‘related tips’ in the sidebar. For example, a related tip in the pears/caramel recipe explains what to do if you don’t have any creme fraiche. That would be just typical in my fridge, and although I might be happy to make something up using yoghurt, it’s great to have suggestions. And I would never have thought that I could make my own creme fraiche.
You’re being generous about the tool, Lucy. It needs some serious rejiggering. (You click this and then you click that, and then you press this eight times while rubbing your tummy…)
Glad you like the “related tips.” I never have creme fraiche either. We’re always trying to come up with new “tips” that never seem to make it into any recipes. How much juice is in one lemon on average? How many grinds of the pepper grinder equals a tablespoon? What makes a mustard a “Dijon” mustard? These are the things that gnaw at us.