Recipes for a full fridge
When everything's about to go bad, make something really good!
We all have those days or weeks. You look in your fridge and realize you have some overly ripe fruits, eggs, green things that have been sitting in a plastic bag for a week, and cheese that’s suggesting it should be eaten, right about now. I’ll often find myself with a bunch of disparate ingredients in my fridge, but not always enough to make a full meal with just one of them.
The other day, I knew I wanted to make some fried goat cheese, but didn’t know what to pair it with. I ended up staring at my fridge, opening and closing the door, until I decided to add asparagus, and threw in a random pear I’d recently bought for good measure! Then I looked in my pantry and realized I could also add the mango vinegar I got from Zabars, and some honey, and herbes de provence, because why not. It was honestly one of the best things I’d ever made up, and it came from being creative with my kitchen to use up my produce. (If you want the recipe, it’s here!)
When you’re cooking for one, it can be disappointing (and guilt-inducing) to gather up a ton of beautiful, fresh produce, and then realize you’ve let it sit in the fridge for too long. It’s partly why I suggested letting the ingredients do the planning for you in my most recent newsletter. It’s also why I’m a fan of recipes where you can throw a myriad of different ingredients together and create something fabulous.
Below are some suggestions of those recipes! I’m a fan of pasta-based free-for-alls (stir-fries, carbonaras, or things sautéed in butter and added to pasta), tarts (throwing a bunch of things onto frozen puff pastry can become a resourceful and delicious meal), or basic baked goods like crumbles or biscuits (almost any fruit can be made into a crumble!).
Pasta-based dishes
Noodle stir-fries and other pasta-based dishes are a great way to use up whatever you have in your fridge. All they really require is a good amount of chopping and a little bit of creativity!
For a stir-fry, I like to use something green (e.g. snap peas, bok choy, scallions, broccoli), something textured (mushrooms, onions or another allium, bell peppers, carrots, tofu or chicken), and some sort of saucy mixture. You can make a peanut sauce with 1-to-1 peanut butter and soy sauce, whisked with water until smooth, and add that to the pan at the end. Or, as everything is cooking together, just add sauces right in! I usually use some combo of soy sauce, sesame oil, and rice vinegar. A stir-fry is also a great one-pan meal, where you can add all the ingredients one after another to the same pan, including the noodles. This also works well with rice!
Another easy pasta dish is just pantry pasta! It’s aptly named for the process of looking through your pantry and tossing in whatever you feel like (or whatever is about to go bad). I like to sauté ingredients in butter first, then add the pasta to the hot pan with a little more butter and some parmesan and pasta water! It gets all creamy and delicious and slightly saucy.
Pantry Pasta with Goat Cheese, Mushrooms, and Leeks
Another option is to Carbonara-fy your ingredients. Pretty much anything can be put in the place of guanciale (I’ve used mushrooms, asparagus, and even sausage), and the base recipe is just an egg plus one egg yolk, whisked with a ton of parmesan, and coated all over the hot pasta in the pan.
Tarts
Tarts are great. A pastry base, topped with anything your heart desires, and baked until golden brown? Sign me up!
I’ve made it a habit to always have frozen puff pastry sheets in my freezer, for when clean-out-my-fridge day comes and I don’t want to stir things around in a pan. You can really add anything to a tart! Veggies, alliums, mushrooms, cheeses, tomatoes, cured meats, and even fruit. I usually like to prick the middle of the pastry sheet and par-bake it for about 5-10 minutes, so that if I add mustard or cheese to the base, the whole thing is still cooked through. Then I add anything I want on top! Usually, you don’t have to sauté any ingredients separately before adding them, unless you’re adding a ton of really watery mushrooms or something. Everything cooks together on one delicious rectangle.
Other baked things
Your oven is a great tool when you have to clean out your fridge. If you have a lot of fruits, you may not want to add them to a stir fry or a tart, but you could easily use them in a crumble or in biscuits!
A crumble is one of the most forgiving things you can bake. Just throw any fruit you like in a dish with sugar, then mix together flour, sugar, butter, and baking powder to create peak deliciousness. It’s a great way to use up fruit that’s gotten to a point where you wouldn’t eat it fresh. I’ve recently made a strawberry and rhubarb crumble as my strawberries were starting to get too gushy for any other use, and I made a blueberry, apple, and raspberry crumble last fall when I went apple picking, and I made an amazing peach crumble from Bon Appétit with super soft peaches… and I’m now realizing I could use my mangoes with some peaches to make a mango-peach crumble!! Right? Maybe? Well, I’m going to try it.
Strawberry-Rhubarb Cardamom Crumble
Biscuits are another great way to use up random ingredients. As long as the flavors go together, they’ll go well in a biscuit! If you have alliums like leeks or ramps or green garlic, they cook in the oven along with everything else, so it’s very easy. And you can even add fruit to the biscuits, like strawberries!
Hopefully this is a helpful list! And I hope it will inspire you to reach as far as you can in the back of your fridge, and make something delicious from what you have left in there.