I love barbecue ribs but, alas, I’m not allowed pork these days (red meat - medical reasons). So how do you make ribs without…ribs? Well, chicken drumsticks work surprisingly well. We call them chicken ribs when we do them. They’re not the same, but they’re very nearly as good.
A disaster? Back in student days, for some inexplicable reason I got it into my head that I was going to make sauerkraut. One of the ingredients was dill seeds. With far too much optimism, I trotted off to my local Asian store, where, after a brief discussion, I came away will a pack of til. That’s sesame seeds. No, of course it didn’t work, but in truth I suspect substituting sesame for dill was only one of the more minor problems with the plan.
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ETA - I’m taking a moment to recommend Lee Kum Kee Spare Rib Sauce.
I was out of eggs one day, but I had chia seeds. They were for my smoothies. I knew once wet they were gelatinous and figured they would be a great sub for blueberry muffins, smoothie’s, cakes and pancakes. They were! High fiber, nice flavor and nice additional texture for baking. They are neutral in flavor and will soak up the flavor or spice profile.
My recipe for chocolate truffles calls for 5 oz of heavy cream. I worked out that 2 oz of butter and 3 oz of milk will give the same butterfat content. It does and they tasted the same. Once you coated them you couldn’t see that there were tiny beads of butter that hadn’t quite amalgamated. But there was no difference in taste that I could detect.
My son wouldn’t eat Western pasta as a kid so I substituted lumps of slightly flattened biscuit dough for lasagna noodles. The first time I tried it I wasn’t following a recipe, just throwing together lasagna-type ingredients but it worked so well that I wrote down exactly what I’d done in order to replicate it.
Years later it is still a family favorite, known as “faux-sagna.”
I accidentally grabbed the curry powder instead of the nutmeg to shake on top of a glass of eggnog. It was a mild curry powder and it was actually quite good. If I had grabbed the spicy curry it might have been a different story.
I make giant vats of spaghetti sauce when I have a bumper crop of maters. One time, I had a green pepper that I didn’t want to waste and chopped it up and tossed it in. Ruined the whole batch, pretty much. Just doesn’t belong in there. I’ll never do that again!
Here’s a swap that falls into the genius category:
Root beer floats are wonderful.
A couple of us were sitting around one day and thought, hmmm. We have no root beer. We do have vanilla ice cream. And we do have some Manhattan Special coffee soda.
Mayonnaise, no, but plain yoghurt is a perfectly acceptable substitute for sour cream in most circumstances and sometimes vice versa (creme fraiche can also work for either if it’s on offer where you live, although it’s less tangy).
That looks good and is probably more practical than my homegrown gyro, which was just too much for late-night dining.
I’ll third your yogurt observation. Around the same time as my gyro experiment, I came across a recipe for Caeser salad dressing that called for unsweetened Greek yogurt, and I realized that it works well as a substitute for or an addition to mayo in several recipes (coleslaw, for example).
Mayonnaise does, however, actually work really well as a substitute for butter on a grilled cheese sandwich. Some chefs would say it’s actually better than butter. Seriously, next time you make a grilled cheese sandwich try spreading mayo on the outside instead of butter. Mayo is mostly oil, so it serves the same function as butter, but it doesn’t burn as easily as butter does. So you avoid getting that burnt butter flavor on your grilled cheese. And it’s so much easier to spread than butter.
*Full disclosure: This wasn’t my idea; I actually got the idea from NPR’s The Splendid Table.
I’d say it isn’t too far of a reach to compare blue cheese with feta which is pretty common for Greek omelettes or skillets (served over hashed brown potatoes). There is certain to be spinach and onion in there as well and probably tomato. For a real treat, seek a place that also has gyros meat (and maybe olives though careful with the salt) and plan for a nap in the early afternoon.
I was looking for a recommendation here for a spicy sauce to accompany a grilled goat, someone suggested a sauce containing cold coffee. It worked really well, added some earthy tones, anyway I figured it would add depth to a chilli, and it does, so I generally add what is left in the coffee pot whenever I make a chilli.
