Posts tagged substituting in a recipe

Cooking By Feel Demonstrated

353 days

by Sadaajit in Food

Alright, I’ve talked a lot about Cooking by Feel, so here’s a written rundown of how things happen in my kitchen. I’d video it, but it’s so complex and I’m grabbing stuff right and left, so don’t know if it would work very well.

Anyway, today I was totally uninspired to cook. As a matter of fact, I would have gone out to eat if there was anyplace nearby that has good healthy food, but we live in the country…

So, I was whining to my husband about not wanting to cook and going out to eat. He asked me what I would eat if I could go out to eat. I told him I was in the mood for Chinese food, Asian style food.

Even that didn’t inspire me. Next, I went to the internet and found a recipe I really thought looked tasty on the Food & Wine site – Vegetable Stir-Fry with Ginger Vinaigrette.

I wrote down the ingredients and headed to the kitchen. Below is a list of what it called for and what I ended up using.

Fresh ginger Fresh ginger
Lemon juice Lemon juice
Cooking oil Safflower oil
Soy sauce Soy sauce
Asian sesame oil Toasted sesame oil
Black pepper Black pepper
Garlic Asafoetida
Snow Peas Garden peas (fresh from the garden)
Radishes Bell pepper
Bok choy Chinese broccoli
Spinach Asian green
Tofu Broccoli

As you can see I didn’t have a lot of the ingredients needed. However, when I thought about the qualities of each; taste, texture, color, etc., I found things in my fridge that would approximate what was in the original recipe. It ended up being a delicious Asian-style dish that we put over spaghettini, because we didn’t have any soba noodles. This is one way I do Cooking by Feel, the other is just make a dish up as I go. I’ll try and show how that works in a later entry.

Here’s a snap of their dish and mine. Which would you choose? (Remember I’m not a professional photographer with props and lights)