Friends and Substitution

In my opinion, you cannot substitute anything for a great friend. In the same way, there are certain items in the kitchen that you cannot substitute for, however there are countless things that have similar counterparts that you can easily substitute. I think many people find the apple sauce for vegetable oil to be one of the best substitutions. This blog posting is for my dear friends TJ and Jodi who were visiting this weekend, and for whom I made the French Toast. TJ and I lived together in college for awhile and he became accustomed to having me cook for him, so whenever he is around I always like to make something special. Friday night I had fried up some fish for us and had some leftovers that were still in the fridge. We all had separate plans for dinner, but were in that 4:00 pm void where you REALLY need something to carry your stomach to the dinner table. I decided that I would make us all some walleye/northern/crab cakes. It would use up some of my leftovers and be enough to carry us through to our dinner plans. I had a bit of a problem though, I used two key ingredients for the cakes in our morning meal.



There I was in the kitchen with fish cakes on the brain, but lacking eggs and onions. What was I to do? I decided to improvise. I used celery instead of the onion and EVOO for the egg. So here is what was in the bowl: diced celery, parm, diced smoked jalapeno, crab, walleye, northern, corn meal, bread crumbs, EVOO, salt, pepper, paprika, and cayenne. I mixed it all together until it began to bind up. The mix was then joined together into 5 nice patties and pressed into some more bread crumbs to coat. They were chilled slightly to keep them together. I fried them up in some EVOO and a little bacon grease. A couple minutes each side until they were golden brown (medium-high heat). For the tartar sauce, which I am not usually a big fan of, I used a little mayo, some dijon mustard, sweet relish, smoked jalapeno, lime juice, and paprika. It was all whisked together and used to top each of the cakes. I think the best part of the whole cooking experience was the response that TJ and Jodi had after eating these little guys. Just because you don't have EXACTLY what you need does not need you have to abandon ship on your recipe. Get creative and see if you can't find yourself a new substitution. You can't substitute friends, but you can almost always substitute when cooking.