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
" }, { "id": "https://gregloucks.blog/articlesplus/346", "url": "https://gregloucks.blog/sr/blog/food/346-one-shopping-list-a-week-of-dinners", "title": "One shopping list, a week of dinners", "summary": "", "date_published": "2026-08-21T14:45:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2026-08-21T14:45:00+00:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Greg Loucks" } ], "tags": [], "_articlesplus": { "article_id": 346, "subtitle": "", "type": null, "categories": [ { "id": 134, "title": "Cooking Basics", "alias": "blog-cooking-basics" } ], "reading_time": 0, "hits": 76, "language": "*", "canonical": "https://gregloucks.blog/sr/blog/food/346-one-shopping-list-a-week-of-dinners" }, "image": "https://gregloucks.blog/images/blog/food/6-7-layer-dip.jpg", "content_html": "Planning meals fails when every night is a separate decision with a separate list. Overlap is the whole trick.
The reason midweek cooking collapses is not time. It is that seven dinners chosen independently need seven sets of ingredients, and half of them go off before their night arrives.
Choose them together instead and let them share. A bunch of coriander bought for one dish is waste; bought for three it is a staple. Half a tin of chipotle is a problem on Monday and an asset on Wednesday. Start from the perishable things and ask what else could use them.
Then stagger by effort rather than by type. One night that takes an hour and makes enough for two meals, two nights that take twenty minutes, one night that is assembly rather than cooking. A week made entirely of thirty-minute meals is a week you will abandon on Thursday.
Cook the fragile things first. Fish and salad leaves early in the week, roots and pulses later, because they will still be fine on Friday when the spinach would not.
The planner here does the arithmetic: put the meals on the days and the shopping list comes out combined, with the quantities added up rather than repeated.
Photograph: lauren — CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
" }, { "id": "https://gregloucks.blog/articlesplus/345", "url": "https://gregloucks.blog/sr/blog/food/345-substitutions-that-work-and-the-ones-that-will-not", "title": "Substitutions that work, and the ones that will not", "summary": "", "date_published": "2026-08-03T10:30:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2026-08-03T10:30:00+00:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Greg Loucks" } ], "tags": [], "_articlesplus": { "article_id": 345, "subtitle": "", "type": null, "categories": [ { "id": 134, "title": "Cooking Basics", "alias": "blog-cooking-basics" } ], "reading_time": 0, "hits": 66, "language": "*", "canonical": "https://gregloucks.blog/sr/blog/food/345-substitutions-that-work-and-the-ones-that-will-not" }, "image": "https://gregloucks.blog/images/blog/food/23-caramel-apple-cheesecake-bars.jpg", "content_html": "Some ingredients are flavour and can be swapped freely. Others are structure, and swapping them changes what you are making.
The useful question is never what tastes similar. It is what job is this ingredient doing.
Flavour is the forgiving category. Herbs, spices, most vegetables, the cut of meat in a stew: change them and you get a different dish that works. Thyme for rosemary, chicken for pork, leeks for onions. Cook what you have.
Structure is where things break. Eggs bind and set and lift. Sugar is not only sweetness, it is moisture, browning and tenderness. Fat is texture. Flour is the frame. Take a third of the sugar out of a cake and you do not get a less sweet cake, you get a smaller, paler, drier one.
Acid is its own case. Lemon juice, vinegar and yoghurt are often interchangeable with each other and almost never with nothing, because in a great many recipes the acid is what stops the dish tasting heavy.
The safe habit is to substitute within a category, one thing at a time, and to write down what you did. A recipe that worked with two changes tells you nothing if you cannot remember which two.
Photograph: Kimberly Vardeman — CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
" }, { "id": "https://gregloucks.blog/articlesplus/344", "url": "https://gregloucks.blog/sr/blog/food/344-a-real-sear-needs-a-hotter-pan-and-more-patience-than-you-th", "title": "A real sear needs a hotter pan and more patience than you think", "summary": "", "date_published": "2026-07-15T12:00:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2026-07-15T12:00:00+00:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Greg Loucks" } ], "tags": [], "_articlesplus": { "article_id": 344, "subtitle": "", "type": null, "categories": [ { "id": 134, "title": "Cooking Basics", "alias": "blog-cooking-basics" } ], "reading_time": 0, "hits": 82, "language": "*", "canonical": "https://gregloucks.blog/sr/blog/food/344-a-real-sear-needs-a-hotter-pan-and-more-patience-than-you-th" }, "image": "https://gregloucks.blog/images/blog/food/21-cajun-grilled-shrimp.jpg", "content_html": "Grey meat in a wet pan is the commonest disappointment in home cooking, and it has two causes.
Browning is not cooking. It is a separate set of reactions between amino acids and sugars that only get going properly above about 140 degrees Celsius, and they are what produce the flavours people mean when they say something tastes roasted, seared, or caramelised.
Water boils at 100. So as long as there is water on the surface of the food, the surface cannot get hot enough to brown, and everything you put in the pan steams instead.
That gives you the two rules. Dry the food, properly, with paper towel, right before it goes in. And do not crowd the pan, because every extra piece adds moisture and drops the temperature. Cook in two batches and both will be better than one batch of everything.
Then leave it alone. A crust forms by contact over time, and food released from the pan cleanly when it is ready. If it is sticking, it is not done; moving it early tears the crust off and leaves it behind.
Heat the pan before the fat, and the fat before the food. A pan that is properly hot will shimmer the oil in a few seconds. If the oil goes straight to smoke you are too hot for most things, and if it sits there looking thick you are too cold.
Photograph: Prayitno, Los Angeles, USA — CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
" }, { "id": "https://gregloucks.blog/articlesplus/343", "url": "https://gregloucks.blog/sr/blog/food/343-what-is-actually-happening-in-two-ingredient-bread", "title": "What is actually happening in two-ingredient bread", "summary": "", "date_published": "2026-06-27T16:15:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2026-06-27T16:15:00+00:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Greg Loucks" } ], "tags": [], "_articlesplus": { "article_id": 343, "subtitle": "", "type": null, "categories": [ { "id": 134, "title": "Cooking Basics", "alias": "blog-cooking-basics" } ], "reading_time": 0, "hits": 76, "language": "*", "canonical": "https://gregloucks.blog/sr/blog/food/343-what-is-actually-happening-in-two-ingredient-bread" }, "image": "https://gregloucks.blog/images/blog/food/38-cinnamon-raisin-bread-recipe.jpg", "content_html": "Self-raising flour and yoghurt make a real loaf. It is worth knowing why, because then you can fix it when it goes wrong.
Two-ingredient doughs look like a trick and they are not. They are ordinary chemistry with the parts already assembled.
Self-raising flour is plain flour with baking powder already in it. Baking powder is an acid and an alkali kept apart by a little starch; add moisture and they react, producing carbon dioxide. The bubbles are trapped by the gluten that forms as you work the dough, and the bread rises.
The yoghurt is doing three jobs at once. It is the liquid that starts the reaction, it is acid that gives the raising agent more to work with, and its fat keeps the crumb tender instead of tough.
Knowing that tells you what went wrong when it does. A dense, heavy loaf usually means the flour was old, because the raising agent in self-raising flour loses strength on the shelf. A tough one means it was worked too long. A flat one often means it sat around after mixing, which is the one thing this dough will not tolerate: the gas starts the moment the yoghurt goes in, and waiting wastes it.
It also tells you what you can change. Any thick, acidic dairy works, which is why the same dough appears with soured cream or buttermilk. What cannot change is the hurry.
Photograph: Mendaliv — Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
" }, { "id": "https://gregloucks.blog/articlesplus/342", "url": "https://gregloucks.blog/sr/blog/food/342-salt-when-it-goes-in-matters-as-much-as-how-much", "title": "Salt: when it goes in matters as much as how much", "summary": "", "date_published": "2026-06-11T08:40:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2026-06-11T08:40:00+00:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Greg Loucks" } ], "tags": [], "_articlesplus": { "article_id": 342, "subtitle": "", "type": null, "categories": [ { "id": 134, "title": "Cooking Basics", "alias": "blog-cooking-basics" } ], "reading_time": 0, "hits": 72, "language": "*", "canonical": "https://gregloucks.blog/sr/blog/food/342-salt-when-it-goes-in-matters-as-much-as-how-much" }, "image": "https://gregloucks.blog/images/blog/food/28-cheesy-garlic-bread.jpg", "content_html": "Salt added at the end sits on top of food. Salt added early becomes part of it.
Food that tastes flat has usually been salted once, at the table, after everything else was finished. The salt is there. It is just all on the outside.
Salt needs time and moisture to move. Put it on a piece of chicken an hour before it cooks and it draws out water, dissolves, and is drawn back in carrying the seasoning with it. Put it on afterwards and it stays where it lands.
This is why a recipe will tell you to salt the onions as they soften rather than the finished sauce, and why pasta water should taste of the sea. Every stage that can carry salt should carry a little of it. The total is often less than you would use at the end, and the result tastes more of itself rather than of salt.
Two practical notes. Different salts are not interchangeable by volume: a spoon of fine table salt holds far more salt than the same spoon of flaky sea salt, so a recipe written for one will oversalt if you use the other. And salt that is going into something that reduces should be held back, because the seasoning concentrates as the liquid goes.
Taste as you go. Not at the end, when the only correction left is more salt.
Photograph: goblinbox_(queen_of_ad_hoc_bento) from Minneapolis, MN, US — CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
" }, { "id": "https://gregloucks.blog/articlesplus/341", "url": "https://gregloucks.blog/sr/blog/food/341-weigh-it-cups-are-lying-to-you", "title": "Weigh it. Cups are lying to you", "summary": "", "date_published": "2026-05-29T11:05:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-29T11:05:00+00:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Greg Loucks" } ], "tags": [], "_articlesplus": { "article_id": 341, "subtitle": "", "type": null, "categories": [ { "id": 134, "title": "Cooking Basics", "alias": "blog-cooking-basics" } ], "reading_time": 0, "hits": 76, "language": "*", "canonical": "https://gregloucks.blog/sr/blog/food/341-weigh-it-cups-are-lying-to-you" }, "image": "https://gregloucks.blog/images/blog/food/2-2-ingredient-dinner-rolls.jpg", "content_html": "A cup of flour is not a quantity. It is a range, and the range is wide enough to ruin bread.
Scoop a cup of flour straight from the bag and you will get somewhere near 150 grams. Spoon it in gently and level it off and you will get about 120. That is a quarter of the flour in the recipe, gone or added, depending on how you happened to hold the cup.
For a stew it does not matter. For anything where flour and liquid have to balance each other, it is the whole game. Bread that will not come together, pastry that cracks, a cake that comes out tight and dry: most of the time nothing went wrong in the oven at all. The mixture was wrong before it went in.
A digital scale costs less than two takeaways and removes the problem completely. You put the bowl on, press tare, and add flour until the number says what the recipe says. No packing, no levelling, no judgement.
It is also faster and it dirties less. Tare between each ingredient and a whole batch of dough happens in one bowl with one measurement, instead of a sink full of cups and spoons.
Where a recipe here gives both, the weight is the one that was tested. The cups are a translation, and something is always lost in translation.
Photograph: Daderot — CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
" }, { "id": "https://gregloucks.blog/articlesplus/340", "url": "https://gregloucks.blog/sr/blog/food/340-read-the-whole-recipe-before-you-touch-a-pan", "title": "Read the whole recipe before you touch a pan", "summary": "", "date_published": "2026-05-14T09:20:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-14T09:20:00+00:00", "authors": [ { "name": "Greg Loucks" } ], "tags": [], "_articlesplus": { "article_id": 340, "subtitle": "", "type": null, "categories": [ { "id": 134, "title": "Cooking Basics", "alias": "blog-cooking-basics" } ], "reading_time": 0, "hits": 68, "language": "*", "canonical": "https://gregloucks.blog/sr/blog/food/340-read-the-whole-recipe-before-you-touch-a-pan" }, "image": "https://gregloucks.blog/images/blog/food/5-3-ingredient-flatbread.jpg", "content_html": "Most kitchen disasters are not cooking mistakes. They are reading mistakes.
The single habit that improves your cooking fastest costs nothing and takes two minutes: read the recipe all the way to the end before you start. Not skim it. Read it.
Recipes are written in the order things happen, but they hide their demands in the middle. The dough needs an hour to rest. The butter should have been softened. The oven wants to be hot forty minutes before the dish goes near it. None of that is in the ingredient list, and all of it is the difference between dinner at seven and dinner at nine.
Read it through and you will also catch the vaguenesses while you can still do something about them. How big is a medium onion? Is that a cup of flour scooped or spooned? Does browned mean coloured or does it mean nearly burnt? You cannot answer those questions with a pan already hot.
Then do the thing professional kitchens do and lay it out. Every ingredient measured into its own bowl or corner of the board, every pan you will need out on the bench. It feels fussy until the first time a sauce is splitting while you hunt for the cornflour.
The habit has a second benefit nobody mentions. Laying the ingredients out is a check that you actually have them. Discovering you are short of an egg while you still have a coat on is a minor problem. Discovering it with the dry goods already mixed is a different evening.
Photograph: Shisma — CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
" } ] }