At the risk of taking this thread off in a completely unintended direction
(who, ME?), let me put a different $0.02 in....

I don't usually use recipes as such when putting together the typical
dinner. My approach tends be something more along the lines of
what I like to call "Iron Chef - Home Edition" - I get home, realize
that SOMETHING has to be done about putting food on the table,
and then start looking through the freezer, refrigerator, and pantry
for Tonight's Theme Ingredient. In other words, it becomes more a
game of "hey, here's some chicken - what could I do with THAT
tonight?" and going from there. There's even the time element -
"let's see what Bob can make out of this in an hour!" - since the
family usually isn't willing to wait until midnight for me to put together
some magnificant culinary masterpiece. (Not that everything I make
with more time available qualifies as such, but...oh, skip it...:-))

Now, I know that this sort of approach is a bit scary for a lot of
beginning cooks - the thought of "flying solo," without a recipe to
refer to, is upsetting. And you probably DON'T want to be
abandoning your cookbook or whatever too early in the game. But
the point I'm trying to make is that you also need to be willing to
stretch yourself a bit, and start to move away from a strict reliance
on the recipes of others; be willing to experiment a bit, and try to
apply the techniques you've learned from the recipes to other dishes
that you put together on your own. I know I will catch a lot of flack
from some others here with this next comment, but I'd recommend
spending a little time watching EVERYONE'S favorite TV chef
(OK, yes, that's being a little sarcastic), Emeril Lagasse - NOT for
his recipes, NOT to learn something new about cooking, but for
nothing else than absorbing a little bit of the attitude of "look, this IS
only food we're talking about here - it's not life and death, and if it
doesn't turn out quite right, so what? Do it different NEXT time."
Too many people, IMHO, are just scared to death to go into their
kitchens and have fun. So you wind up with a couple of inedible
pork chops, or you waste a few cups of flour - we're not exactly
talking about cutting diamonds, here. Have fun. Make the things
YOU want, to YOUR tastes. Play with the ingredients. See what
happens if you add a bit more or less of this or that.

This doesn't, by the way, mean that recipes have no place in
cooking, or are only for the novice. If you want to turn out something
consistently each and every time you make it, and especially if you
want to tell someone ELSE how to make it, you're going to need
to measure ingredients, write things down, and so forth. All I'm
saying is that you want to be very careful to avoid the trap of thinking
that the Only One True And Sacred Way to make a given dish is
given on page whatever of the Betty Crocker Cookbook. If that
was all there was to this, we could replace every chef in the world
with a robot.

Bob M.