Money Crashers: 15 Healthy Food Substitutions to Save Money in Your Home Recipes

In my most recent Recipe of the Month post, I noted that Brian had made a few alterations to the recipe "as usual," such as using plain white rice in place of arborio rice and red onion for shallot. We quite often make simple substitutions like this when we don't happen to have all the ingredients a recipe calls for, and we don't want to run out and buy them because (a) it's too much bother, (b) they're too expensive, and/or (c) we're not sure we'd use them again. We've also been known to swap out ingredients (such as  veggie stock in place of chicken stock) to make a recipe vegetarian, or to make it vegan or gluten-free if we want to feed it to a friend who's on one of these special diets.

Substitutions like this save us time, save us money, and make our cooking healthier. And in my latest Money Crashers article, I've written about how they can do the same for you. I explain all the various reasons you might want to replace an ingredient in a recipe, then offer handy substitutions for 15 common ingredients. You'll find such time-honored replacements as cocoa plus oil for baking chocolate, or milk plus vinegar for buttermilk, as well as newer-fangled ones like aquafaba (bean water) or chia seeds in place of eggs.

15 Healthy Food Substitutions to Save Money in Your Home Recipes