Who hasn’t opened the fridge, three, four times in an hour, hoping desperately that there’s something else in there when only sad condiments and nobbly bits of cucumber stare back at you? While we can’t guarantee we can restock your fridge, we can teach you a few tricks and tips to whip up full meals from what you’ve already got.
Starters
Tuna salad? Salmon salad? Chicken salad? Egg salad? You’d be amazed how many foods taste good when you add a little bit of mayonnaise and pepper to it. If you don’t like mayo, then sourcream, or sometimes even yoghurt, works fine too! Just chop your protein up into little bits (I like to mash it with a fork, way less washing up), and mix it with your mayonnaise. If you have it, a squirt of lemon juice and a few twists of pepper absolutely transform it.
A healthier, greener option is adding chickpeas to the recipe. If you just mash the chickpeas up a little bit — we don’t want a paste, more like a chunky texture — and add a dash of salt, you’ll have something that tastes almost like, but not quite, a tuna salad sandwich.
Entrees
This was a staple of the college years. You can essentially make a delicious pasta sauce out of just about anything. The secret? Don’t throw away the pasta water! That cloudy, starchy liquid is like a magic potion for turning anything into a cohesive, glossy pasta sauce.
In university, I used to like mixing the pasta water with a tiny bit of olive oil, garlic granules, and chilli powder to make the world’s laziest pasta aglio e olio. I’d add a couple shakes of lemon juice out of the big plastic Jif lemon too, if I was feeling fancy. If you want your carbs to have a bit more sustenance than that, try mashing up some chickpeas with the pasta water, until you have a runny paste, and mixing that with the pasta to form a thick, ooey-gooey sauce not unlike a carbonara.
Frozen spinach, frozen peas, and frozen corn all happily defrost in the saucepan while you’re making the sauce if you want to make your meal a bit more colourful, and a little bit less heavy on the starches.
Soup course
On cold nights, all you really want is a hot bowl of soup and a big comfy blanket. One of the easiest soups to make is Chinese egg-drop soup, with little gold ribbons of egg. Just crack one egg into a small bowl, and mix it with a half teaspoon of cornstarch to make a slurry. Then, gently pour the egg into a bowl of any stock (vegetable is my favourite, but chicken works well too!), beating the stock with a fork to form ribbons with the egg.
That’s the base of the recipe, but you can add anything to this to make it more filling. I find that a little stir of tomato paste into the stock gives it a deeper, richer flavour, as well as helping to use up the lonely tube of tomato paste I have in the fridge. Again, frozen peas and corn rehydrate really well in the soup. You could also use it as a soup base for any pot noodles you like! Just add the egg slurry into the instant soup base instead, and let the noodles cook in the broth. Perfect! Almost as though you’d cooked the whole thing from scratch!
Dessert
This one was always the struggle for me at university. It really is hard to make a tasty, quick dessert with what you have in your fridge! If you don’t mind spending a bit more time on it, there are amazing recipes for three-ingredient banana bread, but that does require a bit of washing up.
A really great dessert to try when you’ve got the time is Korean bing su, which can sit in your freezer until you’re ready to have it. Just mix one cup of milk with a few tablespoons of condensed milk in a Ziploc bag, and let that lie flat on the floor of your freezer for a few hours. When you’re reading to eat, just take out the bag and (gently!) smash it with a rolling pin, to make that snow-like consistency that bing su is famous for. That’s how you make your standard milk flavoured bing su, but you can add fresh fruit, chocolate, or just more condensed milk to make it even tastier.
And if you’re really struggling, try out https://www.myfridgefood.com/ ! Just input what ingredients you have got, and the website will generate something filling to last you until your next grocery trip.
Photo by Sarah Pflug from Burst.
