What to cook when the fridge looks empty

The fridge is rarely as empty as it looks. What is usually missing is not ingredients but a way of combining the ones that are there. Formulas travel better than recipes for exactly this reason: a recipe needs its list, a formula adapts to what you have.

Seven formulas that work with almost anything

1. Tin + aromatics + starch

Any tin of pulses, any onion or garlic, any pasta or rice. Chickpeas, garlic, olive oil and pasta is a complete dinner in twelve minutes. Lentils, onion, tinned tomato and rice is another.

2. Roast everything

Whatever vegetables are in the drawer, cut roughly the same size, oil, salt, hot oven, 25 minutes. Sad carrots and a half courgette become good food purely through heat. Add a tin of chickpeas to the tray for the last ten minutes.

3. Soup by default

Onion, any vegetables, water or stock, blend. Almost impossible to get wrong, and it absorbs the vegetables that have gone slightly soft — the ones you would otherwise throw out.

4. The fried-rice principle

Cold cooked rice, anything chopped small, hot pan, soy sauce. Works with frozen peas and a single spring onion.

5. Dahl

Red lentils, water, whatever spices you own, 20 minutes. It needs nothing fresh at all, which makes it the most reliable dish in an empty kitchen.

6. Flatbread and a topping

Flour, water, salt, a hot dry pan. Top with anything — hummus, roasted vegetables, a tin of beans crushed with lemon.

7. The big salad that isn't sad

A grain, a pulse, something crunchy, something sharp, something fatty. Quinoa, chickpeas, cucumber, lemon, olive oil. The five-part structure is what stops it from being leaves in a bowl.

The ten ingredients that rescue anything

Keep these and the fridge is never truly empty:

• Tinned chickpeas and lentils — protein with no planning
• Tinned tomatoes — the base of half of everything
• Pasta and rice
• Onions and garlic — they keep for weeks
• Olive oil, salt, lemon — the three things that make food taste finished
• Soy sauce — instant savoury depth
• Frozen peas and spinach — vegetables that do not rot
• Peanut butter — sauces, not just toast
• Stock cubes — check they are plant-based
• Any dried spice you actually use — two good ones beat twenty stale ones

Start from the ingredient, not the dish

The habit worth building is the reverse of how recipe apps are designed. Instead of choosing a dish and shopping for it, look at what is there and ask what it could become. It cuts the decision time, and it cuts waste — which matters more than most cooking advice, since roughly a third of household food is thrown away.