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This recipe finder will give you dinner ideas using what’s in your fridge

Tired of food waste? This site will tell you what to make for dinner using leftover ingredients

Lindsay Parrill
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We’ve all been there. It’s 6:30, you’ve just gotten home from work, and you stand in front of an open refrigerator, clueless and frustrated. You have no idea what to do with the random ingredients staring back at you. You’ve been using that beautiful brain all day long and now you have to put on an apron and come up with dinner ideas for you and your family? No thanks.

If you’ve ever found yourself in this situation, there’s now a site for that very problem. It’s called Gumbo, and it’s a total game-changer. Gumbo takes what you already have in your fridge, and generates tons of recipes using exactly those ingredients. No need for a last-minute trip to the grocery store.

man looking in fridge
Maskot/Getty Images

Let’s say you open your fridge and see, for example, raw chicken breast, oranges, soy sauce, honey, and green onions. Simply open the Gumbo app and select those items. With one click, dozens of recipes will pop up that feature those ingredients – Healthy Orange Chicken, Zesty Instant Pot Chicken Breasts, Whole Lemon and Honey Chicken Skewers — to name just a few.

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No matter how random your assortment of refrigerator finds, Gumbo has a recipe for you. It also can offer recipes that only require one or two additional (yet common) ingredients. Let’s say you don’t include salt in your search. Chances are, you probably have salt at home. So, if there are recipes that call for everything you selected plus salt, Gumbo will offer that up as an option.

In addition to taking the burden of recipe creation off your plate, Gumbo will also save you money by keeping your food waste in check. A 2020 study from the American Journal of Agricultural Economics found that the average household in the United States wastes 31.9% of its food, or about $1,866 annually. That’s an absolutely shocking statistic. But by knowing exactly what to do with the seemingly useless items in our fridge, Gumbo can greatly help cut back on such an enormously wasteful problem.

News of the new app has been spreading over Reddit like wildfire, and people are ecstatic, exclaiming, “Ok this is amazing! I have DREAMT of a site like this and am excited to give it a go! Here’s to (hopefully) less food waste!” and “This is freaking amazing! Thank you!!!”

Users of Reddit, we couldn’t agree more.

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Lindsay Parrill
Lindsay Parrill
Contributor
Lindsay is a graduate of California Culinary Academy, Le Cordon Bleu, San Francisco, from where she holds a degree in…
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