Photo courtesy of SID CEASER PHOTOGRAPHY Shown is writer and humorist Teresa Santoski.

There are some traits that you anticipate being passed down through a family – eye color or hair color, for example, or artistic ability or a knack for science. And then there are other traits that work their way down through the generations that are a little more unusual.

To our great surprise, Younger Sister, who is now in her final year of college, has inherited Mom’s affinity for making substitutions in recipes. This has become clearer as Younger Sister has begun doing more cooking, both when she’s away at school and when she’s at home.

Mom makes substitutions out of convenience and necessity – e.g., she just realized that she doesn’t have all the ingredients she needs at home, but she’s already started making the recipe so it’s too late to turn back. She therefore does her creative best to find another ingredient that at least looks similar and will thus supposedly yield the same result.

The classic example that our family continues to cite years later is the savory muffin incident. Mom didn’t have the parsley that the recipe called for, but she did have some fresh cilantro left over from making salsa. Both were leafy green herbs, so how different could they be?

The recipe also required white flour, but there wasn’t enough in the pantry. There was some whole wheat flour, however, so Mom added that into the mixture to supplement the white flour. Because flour is flour, right?

The resulting muffins were decidedly unsavory. They were technically edible, but then again, so is paper. Mom hasn’t attempted that recipe since.

Younger Sister is very focused on health and fitness, so she makes substitutions in order to make recipes healthier. Most of the time this works out really well, like when she made a dessert that tasted like a Snickers bar but had dates in it instead of caramel.

And on occasion, it regrettably turns out like the healthy brownie recipe.

There were so many substitutions that I draw a blank when I try to remember them all. I do seem to recall that she used bananas instead of eggs, which, for me, is already a dubious starting point.

It’s safe to say, however, that the brownies Younger Sister made did not contain flour, sugar, butter, oil or chocolate – at least not in their expected guises. The chocolate, for example, would have been a dark, organic chocolate with a high percentage of cocoa that was designed to give you the maximum amount of antioxidants and not necessarily for baking. And the rest of the ingredients followed suit.

The result was brownies that refused to rise and instead laid low and sulked in the pan. They did not taste particularly joyful, either.

Come to think of it, I’m not sure if they could truly be called brownies. The problem with substitutions is that if you make too many of them, you end up making a completely different recipe. In this case, Younger Sister may have accidentally arrived at the chemical formula for rubber.

But sometimes, a substitution can surprise you – in a good way. One night, Mom made pasta for dinner, and Younger Sister was wracking her brains for a way that she could eat it without adding marinara sauce, as that wouldn’t fit with her meal plan for the day.

Unfortunately, she couldn’t think of any substitutions that would work, and she was on the verge of making a separate dinner for herself that would be in keeping with the macronutrients she needed for the day.

Then, Mom came up with what may be her most brilliant substitution ever. She suggested that Younger Sister try a squeeze of fresh lemon juice over her pasta noodles. After some hemming and hawing, Younger Sister did so and added some cooked spinach as well.

It turned out amazingly – fresh-tasting and delicious. Mom and I decided that we wanted to try it, too, and since we weren’t tracking macronutrients, we also added kalamata olives and shredded Parmesan cheese to our pasta. It was a meal we’d easily have again.

If you’re a skilled cook who is so competent in flavoring recipes that you don’t even need to measure your spices, lemon juice and pasta noodles may not seem like a particularly earth-shattering combination. But for us, a family with multiple failed soups, puddings and briskets buried in our front yard, it was like stumbling across the nectar of the gods.

It’s important to note that none of these buried culinary mishaps belong to Younger Sister. She has a real talent for meal planning and preparation, and her substitutions get better and better with each recipe she tries. Mom is proud – and relieved – that she has inherited the more flavorful part of the recipe substitution gene.

For every savory muffin incident or healthy brownie recipe that goes awry, there’s a substitution that works out and works out well. And that, I suspect, is the motivation behind Mom and Younger Sister’s substitution mindset – that maybe, this time, it will not only taste good, but it will be even better than the original.

Which may be another unusual family trait Younger Sister has inherited – Mom’s culinary creativity and persistence and cautious optimism.

Tete-a-tete is published monthly. Teresa Santoski can be reached at tsantoski@gmail.com or via www.teresasantoski.com.

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