Five Weeknight Dishes You Can Cook from a Small Pantry

The small pantry problem

Most households do not have a fully stocked kitchen on a Wednesday night. You have onions, a couple of tomatoes, eggs, some lentils, rice, and the spice tin. It feels like there is nothing to cook, but there usually is. You just need to see the options.

Here are five real recipes from the Degchi library that run on a small pantry. The cooking times are the ones on each recipe card.

1. Egg fried rice: 25 minutes

Egg fried rice is the fastest on the list, and it serves three. It uses rice, eggs, onion, carrot, green peas, soy sauce, cooking oil, black pepper and salt. If you cooked too much rice yesterday, this is where it goes.

2. Egg curry: 40 minutes

Egg curry serves four. You need eggs, onion, tomato, ginger, garlic, turmeric, red chilli powder, cooking oil and salt. It is a good one when there are no vegetables in the house beyond the basics.

3. Potato and egg curry: 35 minutes

Potato and egg curry serves three and stretches the eggs further. It takes eggs, potato, onion, tomato, turmeric, red chilli powder, cooking oil and salt. If you have potatoes, you can feed a bigger table with fewer eggs.

4. Split mung bean lentils: 35 minutes

Daal moong serves four and is gentle on the stomach, which is why it turns up on sick days and busy days alike. It uses split mung beans, onion, tomato, garlic, turmeric, cumin seeds, ghee and salt.

5. Spiced chickpeas: 60 minutes

Chana masala is the slowest, at an hour, and it serves four. It takes chickpeas, onion, tomato, ginger, garlic, turmeric, red chilli powder, coriander powder, chaat masala, cooking oil and salt. Make it when you have time, then eat it for two days.

What these dishes have in common

Look at the lists and a pattern appears. Onion is in all five dishes, and tomato is in four of them. Eggs appear in three recipes. Salt is in every list, and cooking oil, turmeric and chilli or other dry spices turn up almost everywhere. So if you keep a handful of items stocked, you open up most of this page.

That is the idea behind a pantry-first app.

A simple way to use the list

You do not need a strict plan. A loose rotation works well for most families:

• A quick night: egg fried rice, when everyone is hungry and tired.
• An egg night: egg curry or potato and egg curry, whichever your vegetables allow.
• A lentil night: daal moong, light and fast, with rice or roti.
• A weekend pot: chana masala, made once and eaten twice.

The point is not the exact order. It is that on any given evening you have a few dishes you already know you can make, so the question "what are we eating?" has an answer.

Sorting the list by what you have

When you mark items as Have, Low or Out (the pantry guide explains this), the Home screen sorts dishes for you. At the top you see a count such as "N dishes you can cook right now". Under Ready to cook are the recipes where you have everything.

Under Almost there are recipes where you are missing one or two things, and Degchi tells you which: "Missing spinach", with a note if it is already on your list. That is the part that rescues a weeknight. If you are one tomato short, you know before you set off for the shop. The guide to what you can cook today explains how the matching works.

The missing item then goes to your shopping list, and when you tick it off it moves back into your pantry. Open the app on a small-pantry night and you will have a short list of dinners within seconds.

See what you can cook tonight

Degchi is in beta and free. If you want a short list of dinners from your own pantry, join the Degchi beta with your Gmail address on the homepage.