Happy March. Hope you had a nice start to the month. I spotted some summer weather on the way.

I have two things to tell you about this month and I’m genuinely excited about both of them. Which is unusual for me, because I’m usually excited about neither of the things I have to tell you about. But here we are.

A new tool on the site

Dinner From Nowt is a recipe finder tool You know that moment when you open the fridge, stare into it for a while, close it, open it again as if something new might have appeared, and then give up and order a takeaway? I’ve built something to help with that. It lets you type in whatever ingredients you’ve got at home and it shows you what you can actually make from the recipes on the site. No shopping list required. No meal planning. Just “I’ve got chicken, cheese and an onion” and off it goes. Try It Out

It’s properly clever about it too. Type “cheese” and it’ll match recipes that use cheddar, parmesan, feta, or any other cheese variant. Type “potato” or “potatoes” and you’ll get the same results either way. It even suggests recipes where you could make a simple swap, like using turkey instead of chicken, if you’re one ingredient away from a full match.

You can try it here: Dinner From Nowt​

I’d love to know what you think. Give it a go and let me know if it finds you something decent for tea tonight.

For the food bloggers reading this: yes, I built this as a WordPress plugin that pulls directly from WP Recipe Maker. If you’re interested in the technical side of how it works, or you’d like something similar for your own site, drop me a message. Happy to chat about it.

I was on the Eat Blog Talk podcast

On 16th March, I sat down (well, logged on) with Megan Porta on the Eat Blog Talk podcast to talk about what it’s really like trying to build a food blog when you’ve got a full-time job, a family, and approximately 45 minutes of free time per week.

The episode is called “When Blogging Feels Hard: How to Keep Going Anyway” and we covered a fair bit of ground. Things like working with the time you actually have instead of the time you wish you had, focusing on what’s already working rather than chasing every new platform, using AI as a tool without letting it take over, and why publishing something imperfect today beats waiting for perfection next month.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re swimming upstream with your blog, or your creative projects, or honestly just life in general, I think there’s something in this one for you. Megan was a brilliant host and made the whole thing feel like a proper conversation rather than an interview.

Listen here: https://eatblogtalk.com/dadwhatcooks/​

It’s available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What’s coming next

I’ve got a few new recipes in the pipeline, including some BBQ content ready for the warmer weather (optimistic, I know) and a couple of Ninja Foodi recipes that have been doing well in testing. The “Can You Freeze” series is also growing steadily, so if there’s a food you’ve always wondered about freezing, let me know and I might cover it.

As always, thanks for reading. Whether you’re here for the recipes, the blog chat, or just to see what I’ve been up to, I appreciate you sticking around.

Martin

Dad What Cooks

martin@dadwhatcooks.com