Photo: informationisbeautiful.net

When your goal is to make a 30-minute meal, the last thing you want to do is waste the first five of those precious minutes figuring out what, exactly, you're going to whip up for your hungry self. You stare into the open refrigerator, your eyes falling on a package of shrimp you bought yesterday, and then to the asparagus that probably has one more night left before it starts to go limp. You look at the rack on the door, holding all those condiments. "Barbecue sauce? No. Chili sauce? That doesn't go with asparagus, does it?" Your eyes begin to glaze over.

That's where Taste Buds, an infographic created by data visualists David McCandless and Willow Tyrer, comes in. The simple black-and-white graphic visualizes flavor patterns, with each area covering a different food category, like fish, poultry, root vegetables, etc. The categories are laid out like the spokes of a wheel, so the offshoots of, say, the fish category include lobster and crab, white fish, smoked fish, shrimp, etc. Follow those ingredients, and you'll see which flavors go with them. So if you're trying to figure out what to do with that shrimp, try coriander, curry, ginger, lemon or lime. For the asparagus, you might go with cream, eggs or mushrooms. (And if you're wondering why these combos, McCandless and Tyrer say they determined the pairings based on 1,000 recipes from Epicurious and BBC Food).

You can purchase a hi-res pdf download of the image here--which we plan on doing for those evenings when we don't feel like following a recipe but need just a little direction.