Need Some Dinner Ideas?

I discovered a lovely new website today: Supercook.

The premise of the site is pretty simple:  You plug in the ingredients you have on hand, then the site trawls through recipes online and finds things that can be made with the food in your pantry.  Of course, you can do this yourself by plugging in ingredients to a site like Epicurious or Allrecipes, but Supercook is nice because it excludes recipes that you don't have the ingredients for.

You can write in all of your ingredients, but it's probably easier to choose a recipe type and click the ingredients you have from there instead since the way you input an ingredient will make a difference in how it will show up.  For example, "potatoes" will bring up different results than "potato."  Once you get over those simple glitches, though, this is a pretty awesome and powerful tool.

Of course, you can't count on Supercook to tell you every possible recipe that you can make, and you might get several versions of a single recipe.  Nevertheless, this should be a good source of inspiration for you the next time your kitchen goes bare.  Another useful feature:  After you input the ingredients in your kitchen, it will generate a basic grocery list of items that will help you make the maximum number of meals.  Definitely helpful.

Anyway, here's my projected meal plan for the week (with extra options for variety):


BREAKFAST:
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French toast
Pancakes
Breakfast tacos
Cheese omelet
Cornmeal mush
Baked oatmeal
*English muffins
*Bagels
Grilled cheese & scrambled egg sandwich
Potatoes & eggs on tortilla
*Homemade granola

LUNCH:
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Grilled cheese sandwich
Mac & Cheese
Cornbread dogs
Pasta salad
Bean dip & chips
*Quesadillas
Parmesean pasta
Edamame and mushrooms

DINNER:
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Peking Style Chicken
Potstickers
*Asian dumpling soup
-- Fried rice
-- Korean squash
*Cheese potato casserole
*Potato cheese soup
-- Bread bowl
Pizza
Pasta la vista
-- Maple carrots
-- Stuffed zuchinni
-- Maple glazed green beans
*Lentil soup (shorbat addas)

(If you're wondering, the astericks designate meals that will take a little bit of extra time to prepare because they're predominately homemade or have several ingredients.)

How 'bout you guys -- what are y'all cooking this week?