When you go to the store shopping for ingredients and they do not have what you are looking for, do you panic or see it as an opportunity? We often look for variations and substitutions in recipes, particularly classics, to spark ideas and explore tastes. The question arises: if you substitute ingredients, can you still call the dish by its classic name? For instance, we just made an herb paste to marinate fish. The inspiration and driving force was the classic Italian salsa verde. Except, instead of anchovies, we used XO sauce. The flavor profile is similar, the result is delicious, and the sauce is green. Whether or not we actually made salsa verde is questionable. In that case, what do we call the sauce? Because we often look for points of reference, we call the paste XO salsa verde. It combines a taste with the classic.
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