need help searching?

Searching on Simply Great Meals is easy! Type in key ingredients you're looking for, or a cuisine type in the search box, and hit Enter or click the Search button. Simply Great Meals searches for pages that are relevant to your query.

Most of the time, you'll find what you're looking for with just one or two words. However, the following tips can help you refine your searches. Throughout this page, we'll use brackets () to signal queries, so (chicken and pasta) is one query, while (chicken) and (pasta) are two.

Tips to help you find what you're looking for faster

Keep it simple.

If you're looking for a particular recipe, or ingredient, just type one or two words only. Punctuation and upper-case letters don't matter.

Use the words that are most likely to appear on the page.

Our goal is to find what you want no matter what you type, but remember: search engines look for words on web pages. So instead of searching for (main meal), search for (cream pasta), which is a term more likely to appear on recipe pages.

Search with as few terms as possible.

Each word in a search query narrows the results further, so starting with a shorter search will offer more results. If the results are too broad, add a word to hone your search. For example, if a search for (chicken) has too many results, try (chicken pasta) to focus the search.

Choose descriptive words.

More specific words return more relevant results. Words that are not very descriptive, like 'plate,' 'meal,' can be left out. Remember also to choose the words that'll be on the site, even if another word means the same thing. For example, (lamb salad) is a better search than (lamb meal).

Exclude ingredients you do not like.

If you'd like to search for a recipe without an ingredient you dislike such as garlic, search for (beef –garlic) and only recipes that do not have garlic in them will be returned in the results. You must ensure there is a space between the first word and the hyphen, and no space between the hyphen and the word you'd like to exclude.

Get exact matches.

To get an exact match for a phrase, use quote marks or a plus sign in the phrase you're searching for. For example, ("mashed potatoes") or (mashed+potatoes) will be matched exactly, in which case you won't see recipes returned that have mashed ingredients in them, or have un-mashed potatoes in them.