Sometimes when we set about working with a recipe, we find that we don’t have all the ingredients after all. Once I tried to make Thai peanut chicken without peanuts or chicken.
It was bad.
Time logged in failure-ville (there are more margaritas there anyway) can qualify and recommend the expert as strongly as her successes, so I’m inclined to think you should listen to the person who really knows, who did the deed of squishing old tofu with refrigerator-tasting cashew butter lumps on it between her teeth repeatedly—in a small windowless kitchen under a fluorescent bulb at 10pmCST somewhere in the state of Iowa back when Obama was running for the presidency—before deciding that freezer waffles were a perfectly lovely meal.
Some handy substitutions I’ve come across include ground flax seed and water for egg, vinegar for lemon juice, and 85.6 times the amount of dried spice as the original called-for fresh one. No fresh ginger root? That’s ok, all you need is a wheelbarrow of the dry stuff. The lentil dahl will be slightly grainy, but how much do you want dinner anyway?
You can even take this principle outside of the kitchen—say, with your children to the Sciencenter. No extra shirt when the first one gets plunged into chlorinated stinkwater up to the shoulders? No problem— just have your kid wear his sister’s purple puffer vest and nothing else over his naked torso like a little grape-Dimetapp-flavored Hell’s Angel.
Already exhausted your supply of bottom-of-the-purse undies when an accident strikes? My five-year-olds are more familiar and comfortable with the term “commando” than “wash.”
Where I’d most like to take this substitution concept and practice is out into some of the thornier, more dynamic and feral challenges of life, where it can have the most utility.