Follow a Recipe when You Don't Have All the Ingredients

Sometimes you find a good recipe online or in a book or from a friend, but you just don't have all the ingredients you need. If you use your brain you can create something just as good with the ingredients you do have.

Steps

 * 1)  Find out what ingredients you do have around the house and try to categorize them.  For spices and flavorings categorize them into (sweet, salty, spicy, sour, bitter).  For vegetables categorize them into wet (tomatoes, eggplants, cabbages, etc) or dry (carrots, asparagus, lettuce, etc).  For meat, categorize them into fast cook (sea animals) or slow cook (land animals).
 * 2)  Find out what ingredients you are lacking, and categorize them the same way.
 * 3)  Think about the likely purpose for each ingredient (flavoring, texture, color, etc).  Also think about the method of cooking to find out if you can replace the ingredient. For example, you could substitute an egg for butter or visa versa, but you wouldn't want to replace butter with mashed potatoes!
 * 4) *When replacing spice and flavoring, replace with things from the same category (i.e. spicy for spicy. Note: There are different types of spicy).
 * 5) *When replacing vegetables, you may want to add some water if you're replacing wet veggies with dry ones. You may want to stir fry the wet veggies before adding if you're replacing dry ones with wet (to get rid of some water).
 * 6) *When replacing meat cook it for the right amount of time. If the recipe calls you to add beef early, but you're replacing beef with shrimp, add the shrimp a little later. Or if you're using beef when the recipe asks for shrimp, try to cut the beef into smaller pieces and cook it a little long.

Tips

 * If you get oil, salt, honey, and a small spice rack you'd be covered for a good amount of cooking.

Warnings

 * Replacing ingredients may result in vastly different taste. Could taste better or worse.

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