I'm really curious about who "most folks" you refer to are; no one in my extended family does this normally, and I don't know of any friends or neighbors who do it either (we all microwave a snack here and there, sometimes a meal, but it's not how we habitually feed ourselves and our families).

So yes and no in my opinion. First, almost all recipes are written from being cooked in gas stoves and ovens. However, many people have electric. That alone will cause you a problem. Second, tweaking or hacking a little bit of a recipe is a great way to learn what techniques and ingredients do while not breaking the bank. At some point, you will have learned ingredients, tools, and techniques and you can just "cook". You know, like your grandmother could just cook somehow. It was from practice and experience and she always had her own "secret" recipes.

You learn a recipe to eat. And you learn fundamentals and techniques to cook.

Learning a recipe doesn't give you much in terms of cooking-skills. But with skills, you can create or adapt any recipe to your own demand.

I didn't say don't read or follow recipes like some kind of culinary monk. Using recipes is as important to a cook as reading programs is to a programmer. But the focus, if you want to learn to cook, should be on ingredients, tools and techniques. For a start, you will not enjoy making any recipe without a good knife. What's more, your execution will be terrible if you don't know what "finely diced onion" is supposed to be or how to make it, or how much "salt to taste" is. You won't enjoy it and will forever think restaurant/takeaway food is better than your own creations.

Recipes are always written at a particular level of abstraction. Most won't tell you how to dice an onion, but many will tell you explicitly how to make a roux, without saying the word roux. Learning the basics means you can skim and assimilate recipes at a much higher level. Plenty of people can follow recipes but few can learn a recipe from first principles as there are far too many details. To learn a recipe you need to first learn the basics, then you find a recipe is rather easy to learn. Then once you can do that you have the power to tweak them or substitute ingredients etc. as necessary and/or desired.

I will try to give an example: you find a recipe you like at first glance and try to cook it. It's from East Asia and contains tofu, so you buy tofu, and if you live in Central Europe like me there is good chance the tofu will be completely different to what should the tofu in that recipe be like. Same for the rice (and other ingredients). The result will not be ideal, to say the least, because while the recipe might have been good and you may followed it correctly, the fundamentals weren't there.

> a source that explains both rationale and variations

This is the key right here. Not all recipes are created equal. The terse ones are for people who already know what they're doing and just need a sketch to jog their memory. If that's not you, you need a thorough guide. But a guide that explains the why, beyond the how, is far more valuable.

If you can't find such a resource, a good backup option is to search around for a variety of recipes for the same dish. By comparing them, you get an idea of what's critical, what's optional, what is safe to fudge, what you have to get right, etc.

Knowing the why and what your end goal is also helps you adapt your methods to the tools you have on hand. Your stove and pots don't heat the same way your recipe author's stove and pots do. Your fruits aren't the same ripeness. "Cook on medium-high for 3 minutes" is not a very helpful instruction, because its precision is illusory.

The old _Good Eats_ tv show was great for this too. You can find most of the episodes on YouTube.

Another good source is the book Ratio, which is almost like a tutorial in how to come up with your own recipes

The ATK cookbooks are fantastic, not only for explaining how the recipe works, but also explaining some of the things they tried that didn't make the cut and why they thought they didn't work.

They also did a cookbook devoted to recipes for two people a while back. Love that.

I'll glance at recipes to figure out how something is done, when I don't know how to do it. Usually stuff that's from different cuisines that I'm used to. It's hard to e.g. invent a recipe for borscht from first principles if all you know is that it's got beets in it.

Most of my process is just cooking a dish (or an ingredient) over and over again until I've figured out to make it fantastic. It's a great way to become very flexible and learn how to work around missing ingredients.

You said it yourself: "rude customers." You can send back food if there's a good enough reason, but no matter how good the reason, you can never be a dick about it.

> Never send back food.

I like my steak rare. But if someone doesn't, and the kitchen messes it up, the correct response is to either choke it down, or leave a $65 meal uneaten on your plate?