Feel free to substitute

The message came in all apologetic. “Sorry, I didn’t have lemons, so I substituted limes.” Some chefs and cookbook authors might bristle at the blasphemy of messing with a refined recipe. We are not those people and HABIT is not that kind of cookbook.

A favourite part of publishing our cookbook is hearing from readers and cooks about their experience with our recipes. And within this wonderful connection with community we especially love to hear how people made a recipe their own.

This is our style of cooking too. We hate long ingredient lists, especially when they include obscure products we’ll likely never use again. We often find ourselves adjusting other people’s recipes to what we have on hand. And with HABIT we worked really hard to make our recipes simple to follow and that’s especially true of the ingredients.

Our most obscure ingredients are probably agar agar and guar gum, both are thickening agent. We chose them because they’re healthier and more effective than potato or corn starch and they’re better at their specific job. But we also encourage using whatever you have on hand, whether that’s corn starch for thickening a soup or limes instead of lemons.

Experimentation is one of the funnest parts of cooking. It can be scary. And it doesn’t always work out. But most of the time it does and sometimes it creates something new that’s even better than the original. So go ahead and try alternatives and please send us a message and tell us all about it.