As a food writer and self-proclaimed foodie, I spend an excessive amount of time immersing myself in new ideas for food—flipping through cookbooks, surfing the web for new recipes/restaurant reviews/interesting food articles, or simply looking at dozens of tantalizing photographs of food.  

As much as I love—and usually do—spend hours on end finding new recipes to try, there are many days where the thought of leaving the house to go grocery shopping for the ingredients sounds way too difficult—like on a winter night in Chicago when it’s negative a hundred degrees outside and blizzarding like crazy.

I’m sure many of you have had those days, too—after a long day of work, school, running errands, or maybe just a lazy Sunday, the last thing you want to do is exert more energy by walking around your grocery store.  To make things worse, your refrigerator, freezer, and pantry all appear to be barren wastelands of random food items that don’t seem to add up to any decent recipe.  The solution?  Myfridgefood.com.  

My Fridge Food is an online recipe search engine that allows users to mark the items they have lying around in the kitchen, and then spits out dozens of recipes that can be made with those ingredients. My Fridge Food offers tons of recipes for the three main meals of the day—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—as well as recipes for snacks, beverages, appetizers, etc.

When I first came across myfridgefood.com, I instantly fell in love.  While I love being creative in the kitchen and experimenting with ingredients I have on hand, there are some days where all I want is something good to eat without having to think about what I can make with the food I already have.  It is precisely these occasions that I turn to My Fridge Food to provide me with a recipe that I know I can make using ingredients in my own kitchen.  

My Fridge Food also very useful if you’re trying to use up items that you bought once for a recipe but you don’t know what else to use them for.  For example, I needed to use up extra packets of ranch dip mix that I had laying around after I made buffalo wing dip for a party.  I checked off the ranch dip mix, plus the other ingredients I had in my kitchen, on myfridgefood.com.  My Fridge Food gave me a recipe for awesome bacon-wrapped jalapeño poppers, made with the ranch dip mix.  I not only had a tasty and satisfying snack, but I no longer had useless packets of ranch dip mix collecting dust in my pantry.

My Fridge Food makes throwing together a quick dinner super simple and easy, as well as fun and delicious.  It makes cooking a lot less stressful on days when you want to eat something yummy but you don’t see a complete recipe come together with the items in your kitchen.  Experimenting and trying to create recipes on your own is a lot of fun and I highly recommend it on days that you feel up to It, but for all of those days that call for a quick and easy meal, My Fridge Food will most definitely be your savior, just as it has become mine.

 

Send your food questions/suggestions (recipe ideas, restaurant recommendations, food questions, cooking tips, anything food related) to Veronica.  Your questions and comments might be featured in next week’s column!