Cooking & Baking

Cooking really is more about techniques than recipes. Once you've got some techniques down, you can start substituting whatever you want, and making an infinite variety of dishes using the same techniques. That being said, recipes are a great place to start learning. As you do more recipes, you learn that, "Oh, this one is a roux-based sauce, too..." or "Oh, these aromatics are the base of allllll these different recipes."

And if you wonder why restaurant food tastes different from when you cook at home, the answer is almost always more salt and more butter.

Additionally, by and large, people undercook things. You can't caramelize onions in ten minutes. You can't properly brown mushrooms in five minutes. I frequently see recipes with "Sautee the onions until golden (about five minutes)." No. That's not how any of this works.