This is NPR's life kit. I'm Dalia Mortata.

Have you ever been in the kitchen?

Starting to cook a meal you're really excited about?

Like say, a pot of muscles, simmered with shallots and garlic and cherry tomatoes.

And you realize, I don't have any white wine.

You don't actually have all the ingredients the recipe calls for.

It's okay, we've all been there before.

And I think the most important thing is really just being easy on yourself

and recognizing that cooking is a, there's no real silver bullet, right?

Kenji Lopez Alt is a professional chef and has written a couple of cookbooks to help guide you in the kitchen.

It's something that you have to practice and get good at and the more you do it,

the more easy it becomes to make substitutions or the more easy it becomes to adapt recipes to yourself.

And of course you can think about this in different ways.

If you, if you rely solely on recipes, it becomes difficult to figure out how to make substitutions

or how to make changes to suit your own palate.

I mean, a good recipe will hopefully give you a heads up of what swaps you can make.

But even if you can, I wish, I would like people to feel more comfortable making swaps

understanding that they're taking risks.

Deb Pullman knows plenty about cooking at home and taking risks.

She runs a wildly popular website called smittenkitchen.com

that's been around since 2006.

It's just, it's a really great, we've unsalted butter, but like,

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