While you'll usually be following a recipe, sometimes it's fun to create your own stir-fry. At other times you'll want to adapt a recipe to use ingredients you already have on hand. When doing so, feel free to look beyond the Asian pantry.

After all, Chinese cuisine has a long tradition of borrowing ingredients from other cultures. For example, chili peppers, which help give Szechuan cuisine its spicy flavor, are not native to China. Stir-frying is a great way to take advantage of the fresh fruits and vegetables in season in your area.

Most important is to choose ingredients that won't melt under high heat or fall apart under the constant stirring and tossing needed for stir-frying. Choose food that is firm and will hold its shape well. Quick-cooking shellfish are a great choice for stir-frying, as are firm-fleshed fish such as whitefish, cod, or salmon.

When it comes to tofu, steer clear of silken and soft dessert tofus, and stick to tofus with a firm texture. Pressed tofu, which is regular tofu that has been pressed and drained to give it an even firmer texture, is perfect for stir-frying and saves you the work of draining the tofu. When it comes to meat and poultry, choose cuts that are tender and also quick cooking.

It's hard to imagine a vegetable that would be unsuitable for a stir-fry dish. Even lettuce, the staple salad ingredient in the West, is stir-fried with seasonings in Asia. Some types of vegetables will require a little extra care. Hardier, thicker vegetables are often blanched prior to stir-frying, and it's important not to overcook delicate vegetables such as mung bean sprouts.

While the growing popularity of stir-frying is making it easier to find ingredients used in stir-frying, sometimes you will need to make a substitution. Here are some common substitutions for ingredients used in stir-frying:

• Water chestnuts. While it won't have quite the same flavor, the southern vegetable jicama is similar in texture to fresh water chestnuts.

• Dried mushrooms. Fresh mushrooms will also give the dish a savory flavor, although the exact taste will vary depending on the type of mushroom.

• Fish sauce. Although it is made from soybeans instead of fermented fish, the texture and flavor of Chinese light soy sauce is very similar to fish sauce.

• Oyster sauce. Again, Chinese light soy sauce has a similar taste, although it lacks the depth of flavor and thick texture of oyster sauce.

• Rice wine. Dry sherry is the best substitute for rice wine in cooking.

• Chile paste. While it won't have the extra spices and seasonings found in chile paste, red pepper flakes will provide the same level of heat.

If you want to adapt a recipe that normally uses another cooking technique into a stir-fry, start by taking a careful look at the ingredient list. Will the ingredients hold up while being constantly stirred over high heat? Often, it takes only a few simple adjustments to transform a longer-cooking dish into a good candidate for stir-frying: using the right cut of meat, marinating the meat to tenderize it and add extra flavor to the dish, replacing dried herbs with fresh herbs that impart their flavor more quickly where possible, and reducing the total amount of liquid.