Soy. Soy is the resucer of kosher cookery in the 21st century. For those of you who don't know, one of the rules of kosher food is that you can't mix milk and meat. There's some dispute over what constitutes "milk" and what constitutes "meat," but even in a religion as legalistic and Judaism, there's widespread agreement that beef and chicken are meat, and that milk is milk. Now I love Indian food (Indian as in the Raj, not Indian as in badly bruised Buffalo), but a lot of the recipes call for milk to thicken the gravy or sauce. Soy milk is made from soybeans, not from cowstuff, and it's pareve, meaning it's neither milk nor meat.

And it works! Sunday night, I made a spicy chicken that needed a curry. You sautee onions, put in the curry and the chicken, and then add the milk, cooking for about another 15 minutes. The thing worked like a dream, yielding a chicken that absorbed the curry taste, and a pasty sauce-like gravy. Now I know what people back in the 50's felt like when they discovered margarine.