One of the most important points that I learn early on when cooking for a family and with a busy schedule, was to learn to compromise.

Experimenting with your cooking is great and don’t be afraid to swap one ingredient for another. When you are doing this, give thought to the type of flavour you are going to delete and the one that you are going to replace it with. There should always be a likeness, so to speak, about the flavour.

For example, with meat you can probably swap any meat, even cold meat and still end up with quite nice dish, but if you were going to swap meat with fish you are dealing with two quite different flavours and it would not be a good idea.

The same with swapping your vegetables, most will swap happily, but swapping say carrot with cabbage is going to give you an entirely different flavour.

I found when swapping as I was learning, that if you swap one ingredient you are pretty safe, given the examples above, but if you get into swapping too many you may be in trouble.

Learn your flavours and see what compliments each other and what will happily swap with others without changing the dish so much that it ruins the flavour.