It's the age old question" what's for dinner tonight"?  I've got some left overs in the refrigerator and a pantry of odds and ends.  Money is tight.  The grocery budget is shot for the month but I still need to eat.  "What can I make with the ingredients I already have on hand?"  Who has the time to read through countless recipes to find something to cook?  The point of this article is to share wesites that I found that let you type in ingredients and give you a list of recipes that include the ingredients you entered.

My leftovers are part of a ham steak, cooked pasta shells, italian marinated shrimp and cucumbers, yellow cheese sauce and a whole tomato.  The mission here is to make something tasty out of this stuff.  I'll explore a few websites to see what I can make.

Supercook is a recipe search engine. You just start adding ingredients you have. Of course the more ingredients you add, the better results you will get. Great idea for cooking from your pantry, refrigerator and freezer. Upon entering the site I see click here to watch a brief video tour. My search begins. I enter ham, shrimp, tomato and pasta. The site asks do you have items from the pantry like spices, olive oil, butter, parmesan cheese. Wow it found 64 recipes of entree that I can make. The Supercook pulled recipes from various recipe sites like recipezaar, epicurious, Martha Stewart, allrecipes, and foodgeeks. I really like this website have gotten so great ideas for supper.

We all love Google.  This search engine has a database of over 1.3 million recipes.  You can include an entire list of ingredients.  Just put each ingredient in quotes and include a space between items.  I put in shrimp, ham, tomato and pasta and my search came up with 10 recipes which included the ingredients but it doesn't exclude items you cannot make.  The supercooks website is much more intuitive with its pantry item suggestions.

This one looks promising.  They have 3 drop down boxes so I choose shrimp, pasta and tomato.  The search yeilds 165 recipes but again it lists dishes that need additional items that I don't have.  My mission is to make a complete meal with the items I have on hand so the winner of my little experiment is Supercook by far and hands down.  It takes all the work out of figuring out what I can make. 

After a quick scan of the 64 suggested recipes on Supercook I came up with shrimp and pasta in a garlic butter sauce.  The shell pasta had seen its better days so I tossed it.  Found a half a bag of egg noddles in the pantry and cooked them.  Grilled the shrimp in a skillet with some olive oil and garlic added the noodles and tossed it around.  What to do with the cucumbers & tomato?  I just added the slices to the plate like a side salad.  Topped the whole dish with parmesan cheese and WOW!!  What a nice light summer dinner.  There is no way I could have come up with this dish without a little help.  I am totally hooked on Supercook.

I still have the ham and cheddar cheese and noodles so I'm searching again for what I can make. The site asks me for ingredients. I click on the suggested items that I know I have and I get 55 recipes. A lot of them are for breakfast casseroles but I know I want to use the noodles to make something. I played around a bit with adding and subtacting ingredients are finally came up with an Italian pasta salad to use up the leftovers. I used half the ham in the pasta salad and had enough leftover to make a breakfast casserole with some eggs and potatoes.  Mission accomplished.  I cleaned out my refrigerator and got 3 meals from stuff I didn't know what to do with.  I highly recommend using the Supercook website.