If you want to save money on groceries, there’s an incredibly easy way to do it: eat everything you buy.

In other words, don’t waste food. Yes, it’s very obvious. But as I’ve mentioned before, we waste a hell of a lot of food in this country.

One way to avoid waste? Go “Iron Chef” on your leftover weekly groceries. Take the week’s remaining ingredients and cook up a (hopefully) delicious concoction.

There’s a pretty great website that helps make this really easy, too.  

If you’ve listened to my recent Marketplace interview or read this article over at Lifehacker’s Two Cents, you might remember my mentioning a website called Supercook. You tell the site what ingredients you have on hand, and it pulls up a list of recipes for you. Since I’ve mentioned it a couple of times now, I thought I’d write up an actual review.

Get Started

Getting started with Supercook is simple, and you don’t even have to register.

All you do is select or enter in your ingredients. Supercook will ask you what you have, and you can click the item to select it. If your ingredient isn’t suggested, just type it in, and the site will autofill for you.

From there, your “pantry” of ingredients will pop up in a separate box.

Find Recipes

Once your ingredients have been entered, the site automatically populates tons of recipes for you. And there are lots of ways to categorize them, but generally, you can sort them by:

• Meal type (breakfast, dinner)
• Cuisine type (Asian, Mexican)
• Quick & easy recipes
• Meat, fish or vegetarian recipes

And there are a couple of helpful recipe features, too.

The site lets you click on any ingredient on your list to “focus on it.” Once an ingredient is highlighted, Supercook will populate recipes that feature that ingredient. (Let’s say you select “ground turkey.” You’ll see a bunch of recipes that use ground turkey as the main ingredient.)

Second, the site will tell you whether or not you have everything needed for a particular recipe. If you don’t, it’ll even tell you what you need. Pretty damn easy, right?

Set Dietary Restrictions

Here’s another cool feature. If you have any dietary restrictions, you can filter them out of your ingredients, too. All you have to do is click on the “no” symbol (red circle with a line through it) in your ingredients list. Your options will open in a pop up window.

Saving Recipes

If you want to save any of the recipes, you can star them. After you star a recipe, you’ll see an option for “Saved Recipes” in the “All Recipes” drop down menu. Of course, you have to register and log in to do this.

There’s really not much I don’t like about this site, and I should mention, this isn’t a sponsored post. I’ve just really enjoyed using the site, because it’s incredibly simple and does what it’s supposed to do, without any unnecessary bells and whistles. The features aren’t anything fancy, but they really don’t need to be.

If you want to save money on groceries by stretching your leftovers, Supercook is a great tool.

Photo by Cordey.