Not to show my hand too much, but I have very little experience with cooking. Sure, yes, I can follow a recipe and have it turn out well, but you give me ingredients and ask me to just… make something? I’m at a loss. My single semester of high school home ec class did not teach us to improvise, it taught us the parts of a knife and why to leave the labels on your eye droppers, especially the ones with bleach in them. It’s a long story.
Creating a recipe seems like a frankly insane amount of trial and error and research, the sort of thing that would leave me tearing my hair out at the root. I am way too big of a lazy perfectionist to suffer through that much work for that little payoff. Unsurprisingly, everyone’s got their own approaches to it.
One of my friends from school actually created her own recipe, a banana-mint cookie bar with cream cheese frosting. It sounds awful, and I won’t lie to you, I was very skeptical the first time he gave me one (this friend has a history of eating straight condiments, among other things, for some context), but somehow she got the proportions just right that none of it’s overpowering and it’s just good. I shudder to think how long it took to figure out the measurements.
It makes sense to only change one ingredient at a time, really. It’s like going back to middle school science classes, when the teachers thought they had to reintroduce the scientific method every few months. You hypothesize, create a recipe, and tweak one variable at a time until it goes right. Then you write it down, because in the words of the great Adam Savage, “The only difference between science and screwing around is writing it down.”
Will Write for Food 