THE BEST-LAID PLANS OFTEN GO AWRY . . . especially in the kitchen. When you’re faced with one of those inevitable cooking calamities--be it a sinking soufflé, salty soup, or stuck-together pasta-- How to Repair Food has the answers and advice you need to get your meal back on track. First published in 1970 and now with more than 100,000 copies in print, this kitchen classic has been completely revised and updated to serve a new generation of home cooks.     NEW TO THE THIRD EDITION:   • Hints on lowering fat and sodium. • Ways to integrate wholesome and organic ingredients. • Tips for reducing kitchen waste. • Ideas for coping with holiday and other special-occasion dinner debacles.   Filled with witty, accessible, and often ingenious solutions to mishaps that befall even the best of cooks, the alphabetical listings (from Abalone to Zucchini) are designed to rescue any dish from the brink of disaster. TANYA ZERYCK is a stay-at-home mom who, between reading cookbooks and whipping up culinary delights for her family, is a prolific gardener. Her parents, JOHN AND MARINA BEAR, are the authors of The Something Went Wrong Now What Do I Do Cookbook (the original edition of How to Repair Food ) and Not Your Mother’s Cookbook. John is also the coauthor, with Margaret Fox, of Café Beaujolais , Morning Food , and Evening Food. How to Improvise, Bluff, or Otherwise Muddle Through This is the Great Encouragement section. This is the place you turn to when the main course has turned gray, when your dessert won’t jell, or when there’s a funny smell in the house and you discover that it’s coming from the kitchen.   Or, more generally, come back to this section when you have a specific problem that isn’t covered in the main part of the text.   Our message is take heart! When everything seems to be going wrong--or has, in fact, already gone wrong--it is still possible to snatch victory (and your dinner) from the very jaws of defeat and the garbage can. You need only courage, a bit of creativity (yours or ours), and a good set of first aid ingredients for repairing damaged food.   Here, then, is our suggestion for a culinary first aid kit, a list of supplies that should equip you to weather a wide variety of kitchen catastrophes. And in case absolutely everything goes wrong, it is even possible to create an entirely satisfactory dinner for four out of emergency supplies you have squirreled away just in case. See Appendix H for details.   The first aid items are listed in alphabetical order. Permission is freely granted to add, subtract, or modify to fit your own needs and wishes.     First Aid Supplies   artichoke hearts (quartered): If you have room in your freezer, keep a couple of boxes of frozen artichoke hearts in the back corner. They are unusual enough that they look special, and they’re one of the few vegetables that stand up well to preserving. If your freezer is full, you can stack a couple of cans of them in the back of the cupboard instead (be sure they’re not the marinated kind, which usually come in jars). They make a great addition to a too-small salad and are part of the emergency meal in Appendix H.   baking kit: Flour, sugar, cocoa, baking powder, salt, vegetable oil, and vanilla. We could have listed each item separately, but these are what you will need for the emergency dessert in Appendix H. They are also generally available in small quantities (in case you don’t bake much), last for a very long time, and can be used for other things. Flour is handy for thickening soups and stews and fruit desserts. Sugar? You must keep some on hand if you’re going to offer your guests coffee or tea. Cocoa, of course, can be used to make, well, cocoa (which, by the way, is not much harder than using any instant package, and is much tastier). Vanilla adds a homey and very appealing flavor to any dessert. Even if you’re just making an instant vanilla pudding, adding some vanilla extract will make it taste more homemade.   baking mix: There is good, old, reliable Bisquick, which also comes in a reduced-fat version, as well as convenient baking mixes available in your natural food store. With one of these in your pantry, you’ll be comforted to know that you aren’t more than 13 minutes away from home-baked goods like pancakes, cookies, coffee cake, quickbreads, and biscuits.   baking soda: Never let your kitchen be without it. Besides its cooking, medicinal, stain-removing, and deodorizing uses (you probably already have an open box of it in the fridge), it is also the ideal kitchen fire extinguisher, especially for grease fires. Simply pour lots on a fire. Note: Trying to douse a grease fire with water will normally only make things worse.   berries (frozen): Most of the first aid supplies on our list are items that might last you until Y3K without going bad, but this one is different. We recommend keeping on hand frozen berries. They’ll only last for a year or so, but if you haven’t used them for a