Ever have that thing where you really feel like cooking something that has certain ingredients in it, but your recipe books are only indexed by name or main ingredient? Or you only have a few random things left in the fridge/pantry, and don’t know what you can cook with them?

For ages I’ve wanted to set up a website that allowed you to enter a few main ingredients, and you could find recipes that had them. True to the maxim ‘If you leave it long enough, someone else will do it’, someone else has done it. Quite a number of someones in fact.

Mark emailed us the other day to point out Cooking By Numbers, which reminded me that I’d seen some others on Lifehacker, so I went back and searched them out.

Snacksby is ‘Like MacGyver, but for food’, (which I assume means, ‘does cool stuff with very little’, rather than ‘uses a lot of gaff tape’) but also a bit confusing and hard to find what you want. It’s more of a recipe sharing site than a dedicated ‘ingredients search’.

AllRecipes is the best one functionally, you can search by ingredients you want and ingredients you don’t want, as well as any keywords you’d like. You can also select from a variety of recipe types and sources.

The last one is FoodieView, also a recipe sharing site but the search is good, and courtesy of which we will tonight be eating Maple Chicken with Cream de Brie Sauce, minus the brie…