How to Improvise, Bluff, or Otherwise Muddle Through
This is the Great Encouragement section. This is the place you turn to when the main course has turned gray, when your dessert won’t jell, or when there’s a funny smell in the house and you discover that it’s coming from the kitchen.
 
Or, more generally, come back to this section when you have a specific problem that isn’t covered in the main part of the text.
 
Our message is take heart! When everything seems to be going wrong--or has, in fact, already gone wrong--it is still possible to snatch victory (and your dinner) from the very jaws of defeat and the garbage can. You need only courage, a bit of creativity (yours or ours), and a good set of first aid ingredients for repairing damaged food.
 
Here, then, is our suggestion for a culinary first aid kit, a list of supplies that should equip you to weather a wide variety of kitchen catastrophes. And in case absolutely everything goes wrong, it is even possible to create an entirely satisfactory dinner for four out of emergency supplies you have squirreled away just in case. See Appendix H for details.
 
The first aid items are listed in alphabetical order. Permission is freely granted to add, subtract, or modify to fit your own needs and wishes.
 
 
First Aid Supplies
 
artichoke hearts (quartered): If you have room in your freezer, keep a couple of boxes of frozen artichoke hearts in the back corner. They are unusual enough that they look special, and they’re one of the few vegetables that stand up well to preserving. If your freezer is full, you can stack a couple of cans of them in the back of the cupboard...