The idea for this Afternoon Chat came to me yesterday, as I was making Fug Friend Grant’s Chicken Salad, and I realized the recipe called for fresh tarragon when I had none. So I zipped over to FoodSubs to see what I could use to approximate tarragon (SPOILER: I ended up using dill). Food Subs is what it sounds like — it tells you what to substitute in a recipe if you’re out of an ingredient. It’s VERY USEFUL. It is not flashy or funny. It has no editorial voice. It’s just a VERY HELPFUL resource. In this same category for me — in more ways than one — is my beloved Still Tasty, which tells you how long something will keep in your fridge or freezer before it goes bad and kills you/tastes terrible. I use it SO OFTEN because as a single woman, you often find yourself asking, “huh, I wonder if this half-finished jar of salsa is still good.” And it occurred to me that surely Fug Nation has many such websites in their back pockets: resources that are PRACTICAL and USEFUL and perhaps slightly intrinsically dull but NECESSARY. Please, do share.
