What are some of your favorite vegetarian recipes?

[Retrograde]

19. Some ingredients can be leftout without too much effect on the dish

nutritional yeast is often used in vegan recipes because it's one of the few natural sources of B vitamins that are essential for humans. If you eat dairy or even a small amount of meat it's not as important. You can also increase or decrease the amount of an ingredient with little effect on the finished dish.*

I sometimes think recipe writers are trying to sell exotic ingredients. I came across one last week that called for a specific variety of a Middle Eastern pepper, and I was not going to buy a package of it just for that recipe. So I substituted a ground pepper that I happened to have on hand, and the dish came out well. And your 'standards' may not be the same as my 'standards': I tend to cook Mexican, Indian, and East Asian influenced dishes, so my spice cupboard leans towards spices used in those cuisines. I can tell difference between various types of rice, but I just keep two on hand because I'm running a home kitchen, not a restaurant or grocery store. With practice you'll learn what ingredients are important to what you cook.

*But if you leave the chili powder out of the chili you have to ask what's the point, to paraphrase Peg Bracken, who wrote the "I Hate to Cook Book" in 1960 and influenced a lot of my thinking. It's worth reading her humorous take on cooking if you can find a copy (it was reissued sometime in the 2000s), but the recipes are, shall we say, of their time.