Substitution City

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Aya Brackett for The New York Times

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Substitution City

Sam Sifton

Good morning. I’ve been writing no-recipe recipes for a long time now — narrative prompts for freestyle cooking, encouragements to engage creatively with ingredients. I used to do it weekly. But now a no-recipe recipe is, like, every recipe we have. With everyone out of this pantry item or that one, recipes have become mere suggestions of where you might start. They’re like assembly charts from Ikea when you have only 60 percent of the fasteners. “I have tons of overripe bananas and no baking powder. And store is out,” a pal texted me over the weekend. “What can I substitute for baking powder in banana bread? You know it’s dark times when I’m baking, so help a girl out.”

A half-cup of yogurt and a teaspoon of baking soda, I told her, and reduce the liquid ingredients by ½ cup to keep everything proportional. An hour later: “Came out delish!!!!!!!!!”

I’ve made Trini channa and aloo with, basically, none of the proper ingredients, substituting frozen cilantro and fridge-dried parsley for the culantro, random potatoes for the russet, hot sauce for the habanero, canned chickpeas for the dry ones called for, and omitting the turmeric because I haven’t had any for months. I’ve made baked tofu and green beans with chile crisp with brussels sprouts and sweet potatoes instead of the beans, and pickled peppers and doubanjiang instead of the chile crisp. Came out delish. I might try it again with cabbage and Sriracha and oyster sauce.

There are rules to substituting ingredients, of course. You can’t use sardines instead of Cornish game hens. But the last six or eight weeks have given a lot of us confidence to experiment in the kitchen, to try things out of necessity, and the results I hope have led to even more confidence: Yes, you can make soup out of just about anything, and have it be delicious soup at that. You can make fried rice, similarly. You don’t even need to fry the rice! (Are you on Facebook? Join the NYT Cooking Community to tout your successes, or mourn your failures.)

So maybe, this weekend, you could make Samin Nosrat’s lasagna (above)? Or a facsimile thereof? Samin wrote about it for our pages today, in advance of what we around the Slack channels and Google Hangouts that now make up our office are referring to as “The Big Lasagna.” And with it she offers three recipes, for the lasagana, obvs., along with homemade pasta and a tomato sauce. (Samin made it all for us on our YouTube channel.) It’s the lasagana, she says, that she’d love to serve you if you were coming over to her house, rich and hugely adaptable. (See that string cheese for mozzarella swap? Nice!)

Make the whole thing from scratch, use no-boiled noodles and jarred sauce, or don’t make it all! The hope is that, regardless, you’ll join us on 7 p.m. Sunday, May 3, on Instagram Live for a virtual dinner party.

There are many, many more ideas for what to cook this week on NYT Cooking, including all our recipes and tips for cooking under quarantine. Many more than usual are free for your use even if you haven’t subscribed to our site and apps. (It’d be great if you decided to subscribe all the same. Subscriptions support this work we love to do.)

You can find us on Instagram as well, and on Facebook as I mentioned. We’re on YouTube, too. We post what news we learn on Twitter. And you can write us directly for help if you need it, with your cooking or with our site and apps. We’re at cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you.

Now, it’s a towering fly ball away from proofing bread or making madeleines, but if you missed the celebration of Stephen Sondheim’s 90th birthday that streamed live over the weekend, you can get on that right now, or tonight.

Also worth your time: Vinson Cunningham’s interview with Stephon Marbury, in The New Yorker.

Longreads alerted me to a new short story from Justin Hocking in the Columbia Journal, “Aquanauts of Hudson Canyon.” Good.

Finally, a sobering thought from The Atlantic, “What if Colleges Don’t Reopen Until 2021?” Think on that and I’ll be back on Friday.