What can I make with what I have? Work it in this order

You are not short of food. You are short of a combination. Reading the shelf produces a list of nouns, and a list of nouns does not suggest a dish, because the dish is the relationship between them, not the items themselves.

The recipe apps make it worse. Type in three things and most of them return something that needs six more, so the answer to "what can I make with what I have" turns into a shopping trip. That is a search engine with better manners, not help.

The fix is to stop asking what dish these things are, and start asking what shape they can take. There are not many shapes. That is why this works.

Each step narrows the next one. Doing them out of order is how you end up back at the open door.

1. Pull the protein. Whatever is on the shortest clock goes on the counter first.
2. Find the starch that carries it. Rice, pasta, bread, potatoes, tortillas, a tin of beans.
3. Pick a template. A shape that absorbs almost anything, not a recipe.
4. Spend everything else as flavour. The half onion, the tired herbs, the end of a jar.

Protein is the item with the shortest clock, the highest price, and the strongest opinion about what goes with it. Decide it first and three quarters of the question is answered.

Look in the fridge and the freezer, in that order. Half a pack of mince, four eggs, a tin of chickpeas, the last of a rotisserie chicken, two sausages. Any of those is a dinner. Frozen counts: two portions of something from six weeks ago is a better Tuesday than anything you were about to plan.

If there is genuinely no protein, eggs and tinned beans are the two that turn up in nearly every kitchen, and both carry a meal on their own. If those are gone too, this is a shopping problem, not a cooking problem, and no method fixes it.

The starch is what turns a portion of protein into a meal for however many people are eating. It is also the cheapest lever in the kitchen, and the one most likely to already be there.

Rice, pasta, potatoes, bread, tortillas, couscous, noodles, a tin of beans doing double duty. Pick the one with the shortest clock rather than the one you feel like: half a loaf going stale beats the bag of rice that will keep until March, because the rice is not going anywhere.

This step is short on purpose. If you are deliberating over the starch you have skipped step one.

A template is a shape that works with a wide range of contents. A recipe is a fixed list. You cannot cook a recipe from a random fridge, and you almost always can cook a template.

Six cover most of what a home kitchen throws at you. Learn them and the question stops being hard:

• Fried rice, for cooked grains plus any protein and any firm vegetable
• Frittata or omelette, for eggs plus small amounts of several things
• Soup, for the odds and ends and anything slightly past its best
• Traybake, for a protein plus root vegetables and one fat
• Stir fry, for something quick-cooking plus whatever is crunchy
• Grain bowl, for leftovers that do not want to be reheated together

Once the shape is chosen, the rest of the shelf stops being a problem and becomes the interesting part. Half an onion, a spoon of mustard, the last of a jar of olives, three tired spring onions, a wedge of hard cheese. None of them is a meal. All of them make one taste like it was intended.

Work in the order fat, salt, acid, heat. Something to cook in, something salty, something sharp to cut it, something with a bit of bite. A traybake with olive oil, anchovies, a squeeze of lemon and chilli flakes is a dish. The same traybake with none of those is boiled vegetables.

This is also where the food nearest its date gets used, which is the quiet reason the method saves money. Herbs, opened dairy, and salad go in as flavour on the day you notice them rather than into the bin on Thursday.

Sometimes there is no combination. It happens, and forcing it produces a meal nobody wants and food you have now wasted twice.

Two questions settle it. Is there a protein and a starch, or two of either. And is anything about to go off, because if so it is worth cooking even without a plan for eating it: roast the vegetables now and they are a component tomorrow rather than a bin item on Friday.

If the answer is still no, the useful move is to write down what was missing before you shop. The gap you found tonight is the most accurate shopping list you will ever have, and it is gone by tomorrow. Doing that deliberately, once a week, is the weekly planning routine.

This method runs on knowing what is closest to going off, and the printed date is a poor guide. Most of those dates are about quality rather than safety, which the FDA explains directly on its date-labelling page.

For actual storage times, the USDA publishes them rather than estimating: the FoodKeeper storage guide covers hundreds of foods in the fridge, the freezer and the cupboard. Cooked leftovers get their own guidance in the USDA's leftovers and food safety page, which is worth reading once and then not guessing about again.

Use those for the edge cases. For everything else, the ordering is enough: fresh and opened first, sealed and dry last.

Steps two through four are a skill. You get better at them by cooking, and no software does that part for you. Step one is the part that is genuinely tedious, because answering "what do I have" accurately means opening every door, and by the third evening you stop bothering.

That is the part PrepWise holds. It keeps the pantry, so recipes carry a live availability indicator instead of you cross-checking a list in your head. It reserves ingredients when you plan a meal, so two dinners cannot both claim the same pack of mince. It writes the shopping list as the gap between the week and the shelf. You can load the pantry from a photo of a shelf or a grocery receipt, which is what stops step one rotting.

The pantry tracking side is a page of its own if that is the part you care about. PrepWise is on iPhone, it is free to download, and the free tier holds 15 saved recipes and 20 assistant messages a day. The questions people ask before downloading cover the rest.

If you cook the same five meals and you are happy, none of this applies. You are not asking what you can make. You already know, and your shopping list is stable.

It also fails in a kitchen you do not control. In a shared house where food arrives and leaves without a rule, the shelf you surveyed at six is not the shelf at seven, and a method built on knowing what is there does not survive that.

And if you shop for tonight most evenings, this is solving a problem you do not have. The method trades a small amount of thinking for fewer trips. If you like the trips, keep them.