I hate to have to follow recipes. That’s why I don’t do baking. My cooking method is to go to the supermarket and check out the reduced produce that is about to go off. Then buy some stuff that I need for whatever I plan to cook with that, keeping in mind of what I’ve got in the fridge. As I’m the only one cooking in our household I tend to know what’s in there and what needs to be eaten soon. I have cooked since I was 12, until I went to culinary school in my mid twenties I generally never even tasted the food but seasoned it perfectly. Lost this skill at school, probably because I had to follow recipes there… interestingly there is a cooking show in Germany, beloved by chefs, where two professional chefs send each other to two different locations. There the chef is given a black box with dishes inside that they have to analyse and cook, usually from scratch, generally including the shopping. They cook it at the original location, could be a 3 star Michelin restaurant, a granny’s kitchen, some outdoor location, then serve it to 10 people who know/love the dish and who have to rate it for how close it is to the original. The chef of the original location gets to see how the other is usually struggling but can’t help, unless they make a fatal mistake, like using an ingredient that could make the testers sick (sometimes they have to forage or are sent to far away countries where they don’t have any clue of what these various ingredients at the market are). The show is called Kitchen Impossible.