It happens to just about everyone: you're cooking something and then you realize you are missing a vital ingredient. Often for me, it's either milk or eggs. Doesn't help that I have a boyfriend who eats eggs every morning and they disappear faster than I can buy them and I like adding milk to my morning oatmeal so that vanishes quickly too. I don't know how many times I've gone and started to make pancakes to realize we are out of one or both of those vital ingredients. Yet I've never ran out to the store to go fetch said ingredients. How do you survive cooking pancakes when something isn't there? For me, it is a matter of two different options to handle things, but both involve similar steps.
Option 1: Find a replacement
Option 2: Go find a recipe for eggless/milkless pancakes
The first few times, I went with option 1, which involved a lot of internet research to find suitable replacements for ingredients. To save you a little bit of time, you can replace one egg in most recipes with any of the following: ¼ cup of unsweetened apple sauce, ¼ cup of mashed banana, ¼ cup of vegetable oil. For milk you can replace a cup of milk with any of these options: 1 cup water and 1 ½ teaspoons of butter , 1 cup of coconut milk, 1 cup of plain yogurt. Each replacement's value is obviously based on what recipe you are doing and personal taste. I hate coconut myself, so I am probably not going to use coconut milk instead of regular no matter how much there is lacking on the milk side.
The other option came to me one morning as I was making pancakes and again found myself without eggs. I realized that eggs and milk are not just staples of cooking: they are also common allergies. That means there must be some clever cooks on the internet that have recipes for milkless or eggless pancakes and boy are there! Some use the replacements listed above but they are done by parents who have to deal with the taste buds of children, so you know that they aren't going to end up hard or too thick or too thin. Those who have to deal with allergies every day are way more experienced with a lack of an essential ingredient than the forgetful cook who swore there was a full carton of eggs yesterday.
But what about less common ingredients? What do you do then? Well, you improvise. A while back, I was making a meatloaf for my boyfriend's return from a vacation and realized far too late it called for a tiny amount of red wine vinegar. I don't keep that in stock, I never use it for anything else. So what do you do? Well...red wine vinegar is just made of red wine, so I replaced it with actual red wine that we could drink with dinner. Simple solution and it still tasted very good. Sometimes you just have to use common sense.
Or...maybe check your fridge to make sure you have everything before you make it. But that's a little too easy.