When it comes to cooking, thinking outside the box means thinking beyond the pizza box and the Chinese food cartons. It means treating cooking as an adventure, not a chore. Cooking outside the box means finding creative used for foods you eat everyday and exploring your grocery store for ingredients you have never used (or even heard of) before.

Often when we look at a recipe it calls for one cup of this, and one tablespoon of that, and while in some recipes (most often when baking) these rules can’t be broken,  most of the time they are only there as a guideline, something to get you started. But you have to be willing to take a few risks.  Maybe you’re not sure if substituting basil for cilantro will leave your Mexican creation tasting more like a meal from little Italy- but is that a bad thing?

The kitchen is one of the few places where is it okay to make mistakes, so make a few tasty mistakes this week.