We love to cook.  It can be an expression of creativity as well as your love for the people you are cooking for.  What we love less, is organisation – sometimes we cook something interesting at short notice, and a particular less common ingredient might be missing from the cupboard.  Or perhaps a common ingredient has run out and somone (probably me) forgot to write it on the shopping list.

Thanks to the internet, we no longer have to throw the idea out and look for a different recipe.  A quick search of the web will often find a substitute for the absent ingredient. For instance, the other day we were out of baking powder, and couldn’t make banana bran muffins, but thanks to a page of recipe substitutions we now know you can instead use 1/4 teaspoon baking soda plus 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar insteAd of a teaspoon of baking powder.  When Ash had a Thai banquet for her birthday and one of her friends is vegetarian, we discovered from the interent that fermented bean curd tastes nearly as disgusting as fish sauce and can be used as a substitute.

You can use certain herbs in place of others, a mix of milk and butter can substitute for cream in some recipes, and if you are out of All-Bran, you could try shredding cardboard.