For me, at least, I typically don't follow the recipe. Very rarely am I looking for cooking instruction. I'm familiar enough with most typical cooking techniques that ingredient list and proportions, plus sometimes a quick glance at the steps, is all I need to get the job done. I'm usually modifying the ingredients on the fly as I cook the dish anyway.

When I am looking for cooking instruction, I find my existing library of trusted cookbooks to have a much better signal to noise ratio than Googled recipes sites on the web.

I wish there were some “intermediate” websites for cooking. There seems to be a missing middle, where I don’t know exactly to do, but know enough basics to only meed a little bit of direction.

Ie, not step by step, but more general. Let me improvise, but still guide me.