Start from the cupboard, not from the recipe

Searching for a dish and then shopping for it is backwards on a weeknight. Search the other way round.

There is a particular kind of waste that comes from cooking recipe-first: you buy for the dish, use part of each thing, and the remainder waits in the fridge for a recipe that never comes.

Ingredient-first cooking inverts it. Open the fridge, take the three things that need using, and find out what they belong in. Nearly two thousand ingredients here are indexed that way, so half an onion, some bacon and a tin of tomatoes is a question with answers rather than a problem.

It also teaches you the shapes that repeat. Something aromatic softened in fat, something acidic, something starchy, something green at the end. Once you can see that pattern you stop needing a recipe for the ordinary nights and keep them for the ones worth the effort.

Two habits make it work. Keep the cupboard shallow enough to see into, because anything behind something else does not exist. And when you buy a perishable thing, decide on its second use before you get home.

The measure of it is not how impressive dinner was. It is what is left in the fridge on Saturday.

Photograph: Neil Conway, Oakland, USA — CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons