Tell it what is in the kitchen. Get one thing you can actually cook.
Not a menu, not a shopping list with a recipe attached. One dish, chosen from what you have, with real quantities, steps in the order you do them, a time and a doneness cue on each one, and a substitute for anything you are missing. Changing it to feed six is free.
All three ship with a saved recipe, so you can see the whole thing — the substitutions, the shopping list, the scaling — without signing in and without spending a credit.
What this does, and what it does not
The pantry reading is a real quantity parser, not a keyword search. It handles
400g, 1 1/2 cups, half a lemon,
a couple of eggs and 2-3 tbsp; it knows that
1 400g tin chopped tomatoes is one tin weighing 400 g rather than one of
something called “400g tin chopped tomatoes”; it folds a duplicate line instead of counting it
twice; and it treats a comma as “next ingredient” on a one-line list but as a description on a
multi-line one, so 6 chicken thighs, bone in, skin on stays one ingredient. Then
it reads categories — is there a fat, an acid, an aromatic, a protein, a starch — because a
pantry missing one of those changes which dishes are reachable at all.
The allergen pass covers the fourteen major groups and knows the traps that make naive word
matching worse than useless: coconut milk, oat milk, cashew cream and peanut butter
are not dairy, and butternut squash is not butter. It is still only a
word match over what you typed, which is exactly why it is used to challenge the
recipe's own declaration rather than to replace it — if the dish lists butter and forgets to
say “dairy”, this page says so.
Everything the parser establishes is sent to the model as facts it has to reconcile, and the recipe is then checked back against them: an ingredient claimed to be in your kitchen that this page cannot find, a piece of equipment you did not tick, step minutes that do not add up to the promised time, a total over the budget you set, an ingredient you asked to avoid, a diet broken, a verdict that says nothing needs buying next to a shopping list that is not empty. Each one is shown on the page rather than smoothed over.
Scaling is arithmetic and it is free. Masses and volumes scale straight; whole things — eggs, cloves, thighs — round to the nearest half and the page tells you it rounded rather than hiding it; and seasoning deliberately does not scale linearly past one and a half times, because quadrupling the cayenne makes a dish nobody can eat.
It reads and it writes. It does not know what is in your cupboard beyond what you typed, it cannot see a label, and it is not a nutritionist, a dietitian or a food-safety inspector. Nothing to hand? Load , , or . All three replay a saved run for free.