Cook the dish you miss, with the shop you have

You want butter chicken on a Thursday. You may not have every spice in the restaurant tin. Garam masala, tomato, butter or oil, yoghurt or a dairy-free stand-in, chicken. That gets you into the right postcode. Kasuri methi is lovely and optional. Say what you can buy this week, and ask the recipe to stay inside that.

Alfredo, similarly, is cream, cheese, pepper, pasta. It does not need a origin story. Dal needs salt and something allium, and time. The international label is just a way of saying the flavour is specific.

A dish from somewhere else, cooked in your kitchen, with your oven and your supermarket, is a home version. Treat it as that. If you know the real thing well, put the corrections in: less sugar, more acid, a different cut. If you are cooking it for the first time, follow a straightforward method once before you start fusing it with three other countries.

Regional differences are real and they are also how arguments start. Pick the version someone at the table misses. Andalusian, or the one from a particular takeaway. The prompt can be that narrow.

A recipe that requires a special trip for one jar will get cooked once. Ask for the aisle you already walk: the spice rack you have, tinned tomatoes, a chilli, yoghurt, rice, a lime. When something truly has no substitute — fish sauce in a Thai stir fry, say — the list should admit it, so you can decide to buy it or cook a different dish.

Leftovers of these meals are often better the next day. Plan for that, instead of cooking four cuisines in a week and throwing three of them away.