What Can I Cook With What’s in My Fridge?

To decide what to cook tonight with what's in your fridge, you only need three questions, in this order: what has to be used first, what is the base, and what turns it into a meal. The item closest to its date picks the dish, the base (pasta, rice, potatoes, polenta, bread, eggs) makes it filling, and a protein, a vegetable and a sauce finish it. With the combination table and the ten "empty the fridge" patterns below, you can put together a dinner with no recipe and no shopping trip.

Updated October 2026. Sources: foodwaste.ch, “Zahlen und Fakten zu Food Waste” (viewed on 5 October 2026, based on ZHAW/FOEN data, interim report 2025); savefood.ch, “Einkaufsplanung” and “Haltbarkeit”; FSVO, “Hygiene im Umgang mit Lebensmitteln”; FDHA Ordinance on Food Information (LIV/OIDAl, SR 817.022.16), Art. 13; Swiss Consumer Protection Foundation (Stiftung für Konsumentenschutz), guide to date labels.

Why start from the fridge and not from a recipe?

Because a lot of the food thrown out at home is food that was forgotten. According to foodwaste.ch, which draws on the ZHAW/FOEN monitoring published in 2025, each person in Switzerland throws away roughly 80 kg of food a year at home, and the main causes include food forgotten in the fridge, misread dates and leftovers that never get reused. Meat, vegetables, fruit, bread and dairy alone make up about 80% of that amount.

If you pick a recipe and then buy the missing ingredients, you add food to a fridge that is already full. If you start from the fridge, you do the opposite: you use what is there and buy one ingredient at most. It is the same idea as the first step of a well-planned weekly menu, applied to a single evening.

What are the three questions of the "fridge first" method?

1. What has to be used first? Open the fridge and look for three things: products with the nearest date, anything already opened (cream, passata, fresh cheese) and vegetables that are losing their freshness. One of them is the star of the dinner, even if it is only half a leek.
2. What is the base? Pick from the cupboard whatever makes the dish a meal: pasta, rice, potatoes, polenta, couscous, bread, tortillas or eggs. A well-stocked pantry is what lets this method work almost every evening.
3. What turns it into a meal? Add a protein (eggs, tinned beans or chickpeas, cheese, leftover meat, tofu), a second vegetable if you have one, and a sauce or dressing to tie it together: tomato sauce, yoghurt with herbs, stock, pesto or grated cheese.

Base, protein, vegetable, sauce: which combinations work?

Ten "empty the fridge" dinners that almost always work

1. Omelette or tortilla: takes cooked vegetables, potatoes, cheeses and small amounts of cold cuts.
2. Fried rice: made for yesterday's rice and the last scraps of vegetables.
3. Vegetable soup or cream soup: the natural home of soft carrots, celery and half onions.
4. Empty-the-fridge pasta: one sautéed vegetable, a cheese and the pasta water are enough.
5. Roasted vegetables with pulses: one tray, everything cut to the same size, a yoghurt sauce.
6. Savoury tart: a roll of puff or shortcrust pastry, two eggs, a little cream or fresh cheese and the vegetables from your fridge.
7. Filled wrap or tortilla: leftover meat or pulses, cheese, salad.
8. Warm grain salad: spelt, barley or couscous with raw or grilled vegetables and a cheese.
9. Pan-fried potatoes with an egg: leftover boiled potatoes become dinner in no time, or go the Swiss way and make rösti.
10. Stale bread back in the game: tomato bread soup, pan-fried bread with eggs and cheese, or toasts with whatever is left.

More ideas, with full dishes, are in the guide to using up leftovers and in the recipes collection; if you are short on time in the evening, see the quick weeknight dinners.

Can you still eat leftovers and products past their date?

To find out how long each food keeps in the freezer, see the guide to freezing food.

How Rappn helps you cook with what you have

In the Kitchen tab of the Rappn app (iOS and Android), the Explore screen shows "Cook with what you have": type an ingredient, for example zucchini, and you get recipes that use it. In the "At home" section you note the ingredients you have, and with "What can I cook with this" the app suggests recipes; below it, "You often buy" shows the products that appear in your receipts. If a recipe is missing something, you put it in your plan with "Add to plan" and send only the missing ingredients to the shopping list, where you can see which supermarket has them on offer. The recipes come from external publishers named in the app; Rappn is an independent price-comparison app, free, with no account and no commercial agreements with retailers.