Recipes: Make it YOUR Way!

Have you ever seen a recipe in a magazine or on the Internet and thought, “That sounds pretty good, except for the [insert ingredient]”?  That happens to me a lot!  Sometimes it is an ingredient that someone in my family just doesn’t like.  Other times I might be looking to make the recipe a little healthier, simpler or less expensive.

The great thing is that unless it is a home canning recipe, anything can be modified!  (In home canning, the proportion/volume of ingredients needs to be maintained for safety.)  Most ingredients can be increased, decreased, substituted or removed.  Use the original recipe as a guide.  There are a variety of resources available to help you make healthy recipe modifications, including Modifying a Recipe to Healthier, Adjusting Recipes to Meet Dietary Guidelines, and Recipe Makeovers.

If you have a recipe that you would like to make larger or smaller, you can do it yourself with some number crunching or find a recipe calculator online.  One example is My Kitchen Calculator.  This site can increase and decrease recipes by volume or portions and has a tool to convert common kitchen weight and volume measurements.

A few words of caution though:

• Making too many changes in a recipe can make it hard to pinpoint the culprit if the dish flops.
• Try making only 1 or 2 changes each time you make the recipe so you can see how the dish responds.
• When increasing herbs and spices, err on the side of caution.  You can always add more, but you can’t take it out.

One of my favorite “Kate Originals” started as a college student survival recipe for clam chowder in a hot pot.  It is now a 10 minute ham and corn chowder that is a cold weather staple at my house!  Happy cooking!

Sources:

• Brinkman, P. (2015). Modifying a Recipe to be Healthier. Ohio State University Extension. HYG-5543.
• Franzen-Castle, L., Jones, G. and Albrecht, J. (2013). Adjusting Recipes to Meet Dietary Guidelines.  University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension. EC422.
• Garden-Robinson, J., Ryant, J., Gold, A. (2011). Now Serving: Recipe Makeovers! North Dakota State University Extension Service. FN1447.
• My Kitchen Calculator. mykitchencalculator.com.