Kitchen & Bar

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The bar under the name is the map. Swipe it sideways if a destination sits off-screen. On Tonight, the button pinned to the bottom cooks the lead dish.

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  2. This week — Five dinners from the shelf, urgent things cooked first.

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  5. The pantry — Start from one ingredient: what it does, and everything built on it.

  6. Out of it — What to use instead, judged by the job the missing thing was doing.

  7. Photo review — Review a demo shelf photo and confirm every item before adding it.

  8. Flavor Lab — Pairings with a track record: classic matches and the mixology behind them.

  9. Wild cards — Combinations with no tradition behind them, only shared aroma notes.

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Keep it on the home screen

  1. iPhone — tap Share, then Add to Home Screen.
  2. Android — open the browser menu, then Install app or Add to Home screen.

After that it opens as Kitchen & Bar, not a browser tab. Inventory stays on this device.

Dinner · 50 min · 4 plates

Ham potato gratin

Thin slices. Cover, then uncover to brown.

The sheet · 4 plates · 50 min

medium

Why tonight. Thin slices. Cover, then uncover to brown.

What it needs

Nothing confirmed on your shelf yet — this list is the whole ask.

  • potato
  • ham
  • cream
  • cheddar
  • onion

Good if you have them, fine if you do not: thyme.

Method

  1. Slice the potatoes thin and even — a mandoline if you have one. Uneven slices give you raw and mush in one dish.
  2. Do not rinse them. That surface starch is what thickens the cream and holds the gratin together.
  3. Warm the cream with the onion first and pour it over hot, so the dish starts cooking rather than climbing to temperature.
  4. Cheese only in the last twenty minutes, or it browns to leather long before the potato is soft.

An educational plan from a curated corpus. Not a nutrition, allergen, or doneness guarantee.

Cook or pour it, then edit the shelf if you emptied a bottle or used the last of something.

Why each of these is on the list

What the ingredients are actually doing

potato
Waxy holds its shape, floury falls apart, and almost every potato complaint is the wrong one for the job.
ham
Salt-cured and already seasoned, so whatever it goes into needs less salt than it would otherwise.
cream
Fat that carries flavor and will not split the way milk does, which is why it can be reduced hard.
cheddar
Sharpness plus melt. Aged cheddar tastes like more and melts like less, so a dish that wants both usually wants a mix — grate it, do not slice it, and take the pan off the heat before it goes in.
onion
The base under most of this library.

Missing one of them? The substitutions are written against those jobs rather than against a chart, so they say what each replacement costs this dish in particular.

Cooks from the same box

If you bought for this, you can already make these

Next

Cook it, then tell the shelf what you used.

The ranking is only as honest as the shelf behind it. Empty the cream, and everything that leaned on cream should stop being offered.

Update the shelfWhy potato and ham workBack to the ranking