FAQ.

The tagline is a joke that keeps turning out to be defensible. Lentils sit at or near the top of every nutrition-density dataset on the Sources page, they cost almost nothing, they keep for years, and they need no soaking.

Yes. The pantry holds 70 ingredients and any one recipe uses a small slice of them, so disliking a few costs you less than you'd think. If there's something you can't eat, don't have, or simply won't touch, uncheck it under Ingredients on the recipes page and every dish using it drops out of view — on the pantry too, and remembered next time.

Because one plant-based list clears the most dietary restrictions at once. Everything in the pantry is already vegan, dairy-free, egg-free and shellfish-free, which leaves only five allergens worth flagging per recipe. It's a constraint that buys reach. It isn't a moral position, and nobody's checking.

On purpose. Most recipe sites are archives thousands deep, so you click a chili recipe and quietly wonder whether you got the two-thousandth best one. I'd rather publish 30 things and have all of them be worth cooking. Most of the work here now goes into improving recipes already on the list rather than adding new ones.

Mostly. The nutrition data and the recipes travel fine. Cost figures are U.S. retail and won't map cleanly to other markets — treat relative cost comparisons as more portable than absolute prices.

Because the pantry is defined by what every recipe is allowed to use, not by which shelf it sits on. The only fresh vegetables that qualify are the hardy ones — carrots, cabbage, onions, potatoes — which restock on the same slow cadence as the dry goods rather than wilting in a week. Frozen produce earns its place twice: it keeps for months, and it's usually picked ripe and frozen within hours, so it holds its nutrients better than fresh produce that spent days in transit and another few on a shelf.

The pantry list and methodology change rarely and deliberately. Any change that moves a score, a ranking, or the qualifying list bumps the version number in the top bar and gets a changelog entry on Sources, so you can always see what moved and why.

No. It's a cooking system built on published nutrition research, with every claim cited so you can check my work. If you have a clinical condition, your dietitian outranks my spreadsheet.

Enthusiastically. If you find a miscited claim, a broken source, or a number that doesn't hold up, send it over — I'll fix it and log the fix.