Mangia! keeps a Pantry, a list of food items that it thinks you have available for cooking. One of the main uses of the Pantry is in searching for recipes; if your Pantry is reasonably accurate (and Mangia! includes a bevy of tools for keeping it up), you can tell Mangia! you want to Cook Without Shopping, and it will find you recipes that can be made with what you have in the Pantry. Here's how:
• Bring up the Full Recipe Finder. (From either a Recipe File Window or the Recipe Browser, the easiest way to get to the Full Finder is to hold down the Option key while you click on the Match What button.)
• Check the Cook Without Shopping box.
• Open the Pantry window by clicking on Update Pantry.
• Enter the foods you have in your kitchen. You don’t specify quantities—just list the ingredients themselves. Of course this will be a time-consuming process the first time, but Mangia! will remember the contents of your Pantry for the next time.
• Close the Pantry window and the Full Finder. Back in the window you started in, make sure List Only Matches is checked.
Mangia! will now show a much shorter list of recipes, because it has eliminated (more or less) any recipes containing anything that you didn't say you had. The "more or less" is due to a few details about how recipes are matched to your Pantry, to wit:
• If a recipe specifies "Ingredient A or Ingredient B" at some point, and you have A but not B (or vice versa), then the recipe will still be listed.
• If a recipe has an ingredient that’s marked as Optional, then it doesn’t matter whether that ingredient is in the Pantry or not. Mangia! assumes you can still fix the dish, at least with respect to that ingredient.
• If you are have put some ingredients into the Foods To Use or Main Ingredients boxes of the Full Finder, then Mangia! will act as though you have those ingredients even though they’re not listed in your Pantry.
• If your Pantry includes some ingredient Category name, then Mangia! will act as though you have everything in that Category. For example, if you put "fish" into your inventory, then it will satisfy "striped bass" in a recipe.
The Cook Without Shopping option can easily empty the recipe list out entirely, because almost all the ingredients in a recipe need to appear in some form in the Pantry for the recipe to be listed. For that reason, you need to use this option with care.
The Pantry can be a handy tool for avoiding trips to the store, but only if it is reasonably up to date. The Shopping List Window can help maintain your Pantry, and it is also the other place where the Pantry is most useful.
