How to cook with what you have

Short answer: start from the one ingredient that has to be used, add two staples you always have (a carb and something for flavour), and look for a recipe that uses most of what you have rather than a perfect match. Being one or two ingredients short is normal; there is almost always a swap.

Cooking with what you have is mostly a decision problem, not a recipe problem. The ingredients are there. What is missing is a starting point.

A three-step workflow

1. Take a 60-second inventory. Look for four things: a protein (eggs, chicken, beans, tofu), a carb (rice, pasta, bread, potatoes, tortillas), a vegetable, and a flavour (garlic, onion, soy sauce, lemon, cheese, spices).
2. Pick the must-use ingredient. The thing that will go off first decides the dish. Everything else supports it.
3. Accept “almost”. A recipe that uses five of your seven ingredients and needs one extra lemon is a win. Waiting for a 100 % match is how the spinach ends up in the bin.

The staples that unlock the most recipes

We looked at how often each ingredient appears in the main dishes of the Chef Drago catalogue (October 2026). Leaving out salt, pepper and oil, the ingredients that come back the most are:

1. Garlic
2. Onion
3. Butter
4. Fresh parsley
5. Chicken breast
6. Pasta
7. Spring onions
8. Lemon
9. Eggs
10. Parmesan
11. Bell peppers
12. Carrots
13. Canned crushed tomatoes

If these are usually in your kitchen, you can cook a large share of everyday recipes with only one or two extra items.

Five combinations that turn leftovers into dinner

You have	Make	Time
Eggs + cooked rice + any vegetables	Egg fried rice with veggies	15 min
Pasta + butter + garlic + parmesan	Buttery garlic parmesan pasta	22 min
Canned kidney beans + corn + tomatoes	Quick kidney bean and corn chili	18 min
Cauliflower + rice + curry spices	Curried cauliflower with rice	20 min
Tortillas + cheese + mushrooms	Mushroom and cheddar quesadillas	15 min

Avoid waste without taking risks

• Use the most fragile things first: herbs, salad leaves, berries, opened cream.
• Cooked rice and leftovers belong in the fridge quickly and should be eaten within a day or two, reheated until steaming hot.
• If something smells or looks wrong, do not taste it to check. When in doubt, throw it out.

Let the app do the matching

In Chef Drago, you can tell the app which ingredients you have. Every recipe card in the deck then shows how many of them it uses, with what you have and what you are missing, so you can see at a glance which dinner fits your fridge. Swipe, pick the winner in the duel, and cook it step by step.