How to Cook Anything

September 19, 2009 7:36 PM

How to Cook Anything
Find and choose the most common ingredients in the dish you want to cook.

Go to http://cookthing.com . Type in what you want to cook. You get a a list of the most common ingredients in that dish along with the percentage of recipes that have this ingredient. Select the ingredients you want to use. You get back the recipes for the dish you want to cook, which use the ingredients you have selected.

posted by kbrower3 (7 comments total)

hmmm... steak + oatmeal cookies got me nowhere... somehow it doesn't seem to really be able to cook anything...

nonetheless - pretty damn cool - decent concept and nice work.
posted by Nanukthedog at 7:21 PM on September 21, 2009

Interestingly, onion features in more recipies for tomato soup than tomato.
posted by Effigy2000 at 9:50 PM on September 21, 2009

I like it - but - I got loads of recipes for canned beans when I used "dry beans" as my search. This was on purpose, we grew loads of beans this year, and I want recipes for them, not canned ones....
Neat thing though - I'll use it for sure!
posted by dbmcd at 3:03 PM on September 27, 2009

This is interesting, but I do think there are some data problems if less than 50% of banana bread recipes use bananas.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:58 AM on September 29, 2009

WHAT a great idea. In fairness there are other sites that do this (my favorite is cooking light) but I am very happy to have another online source to do something new with what's in the pantry.
posted by bearwife at 2:56 PM on October 22, 2009

Oh, I take it back -- this is not like anything else, but is just plain cool. No other site I've found can troll so fast for recipes that use the specified ingredients.
posted by bearwife at 3:01 PM on October 22, 2009

Posted on the Blue, as referenced in Ask Recipe Labs FPP.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:19 AM on November 20, 2009