Some of these recipes seem decent if you're already somewhat experienced and have developed cook's intuition. Otherwise they're way too vague. For instance, the chicken parm recipe: - There should be a photo of how to slice the chicken breast. Saying "through their width" isn't good enough. I had to explain what "lengthwise" was once because my friend cut all the vegetables the exact opposite of it. - Pound with what…
I learned to cook a lot from the 3x5 cards my mom has in a cupboard. They list stuff like a "pinch" of salt or a "stick" of butter. Sometimes I'll make her dinner from her recipe and she'll be surprised and say "that's not the way I do it" and then she'll really enjoy the food anyway. I think interpretation is what makes cooking an art, and many times, those little individual choices we make to interpret a recipe or…
A large category where it matters a lot (I've heard) is baking. If you're making a soup or a sauce or some mashed potatoes, most of your changes are predictable and linear -- less salt means less salty. Less butter means less buttery. But when you bake things interact in sharp ways, and the ingredients interact with each other in more interesting ways. Maybe "less predictably" with certain priors -- not in a strong sense (it's chemistry). But in a weaker sense, "why didn't it rise" isn't answerable by "didn't add enough X" for any fixed X, and in most recipes 2X won't mean "twice as much rising".