Website Wednesday: Super Cook

When I really decided to crack down on our budget, one of the first things I eliminated was all of those extra visits to the grocery store. While that decision certainly cut down on the amount of money I was spending each week on impromptu shopping trips, it sometimes presented a new problem.

I spent many evenings randomly opening the fridge, the freezer, and the cabinets, wracking my brain for supper ideas. Maybe it's just me, but I'm not the best when it comes to surveying a bunch of random ingredients and forming a meal idea in my mind. I'm also not very good at winging it. If I'm making something, I like to have a recipe to follow, or at least a recipe to use as a jumping-off point.

Enter: Super Cook. Super Cook is a recipe search engine that allows you to enter the ingredients you have on hand and, in turn, it produces a list of matching recipes. Super Cook pulls from many of my favorite recipe websites, like Epicurious, Food, and All Recipes. They also allow you to choose food exclusions, so you can search only recipes based on dietary restrictions, like nut allergies or vegetarianism.

You can access Super Cook and search for recipes without signing up for an account. If you do choose to sign up, you can save your favorite recipes and the list of ingredients you have on hand. I haven't signed up, because I think it's easier to find a recipe I like, and then either pin that recipe on Pinterest, or copy it to a note card and put it in my recipe box.

If you're working on reducing the amount of money you spend on groceries each week, a recipe search engine is a helpful tool. Next time you're tempted to make a five o' clock grocery store run, do yourself (and your budget) a favor, and check out Super Cook.