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 feel much the same way about food recipes as I do about tech how-to's which describe steps but not reasons.

A simple statement of ingredients, processing, times, temperatures, etc., should get you something serviceable. But a guide which tells you what each ingredient, step, etc., is doing to the finished product is far more informative. Also those which let you know whether a value is a minimum or maximum, and how much flexibility there is to it. Much the same as a step-by-step systems admin guide works if everything goes right, but is entirely useless if you run up against a problem, in which case what you desperately need is troubleshooting and compensation/correction guidance.

For example, if a sourdough bread-making recipe gives an instruction "autolyse for 30 minutes", is there any indication that going shorter or longer is possible, or even preferable? (In practice you can autolyse for hours if you choose to do so, 20--40 minutes is a minimum.) How sensitive is dough to overfermentation? What will more, or less, salt do? How does starter change its behaviour in warmer or cooler conditions? What's too warm? Is there such a thing as too cold? How should you adjust hydration for different doughs (whole wheat, rye, spelt, einkorn, semolina, etc. --- something I'm still learning FWIW, though generally WW more, rye less, spelt about the same). How does dough change with a longer cold ferment (1 day vs. 2, 3, or more)?

A recipe is is a sequence with no flow or feedback logic to it. Techniques give you tools to control the process.

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.

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.

Alton Brown's "I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking" is a fun intro too.

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.

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

> 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.

Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking is essential if you're interested in this stuff.

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.

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).

I suspect this probably applies more to certain nations. Microwave meals are a lot less prevalent in Europe as a staple.

> 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?

If a customer noticed and called a cook out for intentionally dropping their food on the floor and serving it to them i think that would be the death of the restaurant. Or at least cause the local health department to get very interested. What most likely happens is the customer doesn't even realize. If that's the case, then from the customer's perspective it didn't even happen so what's the point of doing it in the first place? You got revenge on no one.

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.

Your friend worked there to pay bills. Was hired to fulfill certain tasks, enabling that steakhouse to provide its advertised services to its clients. Adhering to certain quality standards, to sufficiently satisfy the client-business contract.

Never provide substandard work. Your friend simply showed (or at least witnessed) bad work ethics.

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"You have to be careful with videos of chefs cooking, because they often don't eat the exact thing that they're filming. The finished dish you see at the end or showed off might be cooked at a different time (usually beforehand) and in a far more sanitary way. What you're seeing is filmed that way for the sake of doing less dishes."

I cannot emphasize this view enough: The problem with cooking videos is, "what did they edit?". If the video doesn't at least slide a little homage to the peon peeling the onions, can you trust it? If not, I don't!

I didn't know what 'heteronormative culture' was, so I went to look it up. I found this: "Heteronormativity is the concept that heterosexuality is the preferred or normal sexual orientation." It seems to me to be a pretty radical idea that culture could not be 'heteronormative' because heterosexuality IS the preferred and normal sexual orientation since 1-babies need to be born for existence to perpetuate (this is basically the purpose of life) and 2-non-heterosexual people continue to this day (even with all the radical celebration of deviance) to be a tiny minority. That said I think it is dumb to try to pressure kids to 'be straight' (lol, you don't choose who you're attracted to). If you're saying 'to live as you choose' to mean 'to live as a single person with no familial support', then yea, you're setting yourself up for a rough time and I can't imagine how you're going to 'restructure the culture' to support this, nor why you would want to aside from attempts at self gratification.

I don't even know what you're talking about with this 'Freedom to leave a marriage' part. It seems like a smorgasbord of ideas smashed together rather incoherently, my apologies but it's after lunch and maybe my brain isn't all functioning 100%.

Ok I also don't understand what you're talking about in 'Fewer mental health isues' either. It seems like you're trying really hard to imagine a fantasy reality where non-heterosexual people can live by themselves - but with a partner if they want - but they can leave - but they should be able to leave and be by themselves and be just fine - all with regard to COOKING specifically. Am I getting in the ball park there? I don't really know what you're getting at. When you deviate from 'normal' culture, life is going to be harder for you. That's how our world works. The people that have and are trying to change that... just watch for if things are getting better in their wake, or worse in their wake.

I suspect economic stability comes more from personal responsibility than 'personal flexibility'. One must make great sacrifices, in general, to develop the character to be able to progress in most areas. What I typically see from the crowd wanting more freedoms is the freedom to be more hedonistic, where I see the people more grateful to exist and actually progressing growing their discipline and losing their selfishness.

>>> "in crisis due to various social factors making full-time wives and moms relatively rare"

>>> "It seems likely to me we need to rethink and rework our food culture so everyone can eat adequately"

How could the second work without fixing the first?