Finding New Recipes

Because we cannot go anywhere, I have put all of my “new experiences” budget into making new recipes. I go for about two or three new ones per week, and I repeat whatever people are in the mood for on the other four nights.

Because we only go shopping once a week or once every other week, we need to plot out ingredients well in advance. So I can look back to March and see what we’ve eaten every week of the pandemic. Isn’t that bizarre? I’ve seen recipes grow in popularity and then disappear altogether, and other recipes pop up in almost every single two-week PDF.

Every once in a while, we’ll plan for a meal and everything will fall apart. We’ll be left with an ingredient that has no culinary home. For instance, I misread a recipe, asked Josh to buy ricotta, and had to figure out how to use said ricotta in something else.

Someone brilliant made a database where you can put in an ingredient, and it will tell you recipes that use said ingredient. Like two million different recipes.

So I put in ricotta. You can narrow things down by using the options on the left sidebar. For instance, I knew I wanted a pasta dish, so I started choosing other ingredients that would be in a pasta dish (olive oil) and skipping ones that may go into a dessert (vanilla). And a bunch of good options bubbled up to the top.

Brilliant.