There are, by my count, at least seven levels of fried chicken. The worst of them is good; the best, which I waited forty-four years to find, led to what can only be called an out-of-body experience. Let’s start at …
How to Bake With Limited Ingredients
You don't need a jar of quince preserves or chili-infused cocoa powder to make great baked goods. The basic ingredients for most recipes are flour, sugar, eggs and butter -- but even these are not absolute necessities. If you don't have a well-stocked kitchen or the money to spend on gourmet ingredients, you can still whip up delicious desserts -- it just takes a little creativity. Finding the right recipe is half of the battle, and there are several tricks you can use to convert recipes to fit the ingredients you have on hand. Add this to my Recipe Box.
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Instructions
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Take an inventory of your kitchen to figure out exactly what you do have. Sometimes, kitchens become cluttered, so you may not realize you have a key ingredient sitting on the back of a shelf somewhere.
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Figure out what kind of recipe you can make with these ingredients. For example, if you have sugar and butter, and no eggs or flour, you won't be able to make a typical cake or cookie, but you might be able to make peanut butter cookies, bananas Foster, chocolate-dipped strawberries, rice crispy bars or fudge.
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Keep your dish simple. Toss whatever fruit you have lying around with some sugar and bake it until it is tender. Make a cake or a cookie that only requires the very essential ingredients: butter, sugar, eggs and flour. Often the simpler dishes are the ones that taste the best. Basic bread only requires flour and water.
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Substitute for ingredients that you don't have. If you are making a cake and do not have any baking powder, substitute 1/4 tsp. baking soda plus 1/2 tsp. cream of tartar plus 1/4 tsp. cornstarch for every teaspoon of baking powder that you need. If you don't have the right kind of chocolate, add the kind you do have and add or remove a little of the sugar from the recipe. Use maple syrup or molasses in place of honey; use orange or lime in place of lemon zest or juice. Add 1 tbsp. of vinegar to 1 cup of regular milk to make buttermilk.
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Put uncommon ingredients together -- be creative in your cooking. If you don't have chocolate chips for your cookies, use dried fruit, nuts or chopped-up bits of candy bars. Sprinkle cookies with sea salt, coffee powder, pepper or a blend of nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon. Spread a cake with canned fruit, add a spice like cardamom or cayenne pepper, or drizzle the cake with honey instead of icing.
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Keep essential ingredients like flour, sugar, butter and eggs in stock when you can. With these very simple items, you can use whatever else is lying around the kitchen to make almost anything.
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