Ingredient substitution - In dire need, use this

I'm sure it has happened to everyone - you pick a recipe you like, you go gather all the ingredients and you find out that you are one egg short, there's less cornstarch then you thought or that the honey jar is nowhere to be found. So instead of baking you're looking for Winnie the Pooh or making a shopping list since you're going to the supermarket now and the baking is left postponed.

a TV chef known for substituting fish with sausage

Balls!

Well, fortunately there are tricks how to substitute certain ingredients to achieve a similar result. I went through several pages and picked out some of the most useful and interesting substitutions. Turns out that some of the less-available ingredients can be substituted easily and surprisingly many of the standard ingredients as well. However, as many of the sites note, nothing should be overdone and more than one substitution may yield quite a different product in the end - flavour-wise and quite probably consistency-wise too.

Custom baking: what ingredients do in a cake

There's chance that these guys will rise

Do you ever wonder how things work? How come a CRT screen while showing black is still emitting light? Why does it make sound when I crack my knuckles? What is yawning all about? What does milk do in a cake and why does it take a whole cube of butter to make the battenberg cake?

We don't live in the ol' days of analog knowledge where you either had to pick up a huge book and (gasp!) flip pages until you found the answer, or ask your grandma (because they sure know a lot). Anything you want to know is just a Google search away. I've recently pondered, as I closed door to the oven and saw an unopened bottle of milk and remembered that I forgot to add it to the batter, what is milk good for in a cake anyway? The batter was gooey enough and the cake turned out alright in the end, only perhaps a bit too crumbly.

Why I don't like Settlers of Catan: A Rant

In all honesty, Settlers of Catan was pretty much the first geeky board game that I've ever played. By first geeky board game I mean that I don't count the games like Scrabble, Chess or Checkers, games with no theme and no abstract gameplay. Settlers of Catan were the first game where I played something like a settler colonizing an island, gathering resources and building cities. This make-believe style of playing was so refreshing, so intriguing to a 12 year old boy that I quickly fell in love with exchanging sheep for bricks and hoping to have the longest trade route.

As time went by, I played more and more board games and even watched as couple of my friends designed and published their own board game to a modest success. I started to understand the mechanism inside the games and I saw the two extremes of pure control (as in Chess) and pure luck (as in Monopoly).Settlers of Catan eventually gave way to other games and when I played Settlers again after about 2 years, I tried in vain to enjoy the game like I had used to. The rolling of dice, that seemed to hate the numbers I needed, made me groan as bad luck was indeed the prime factor that influenced the enjoyment from the whole game. I asked myself what changed, what happened to me that made this game so uninteresting?