Growing up in a Mauritian household, food was never something you learned from a recipe. It was something that happened around you, constantly, and you absorbed it or you didn't. The problem is I didn't pay enough attention when I had the chance, and now I'm in my thirties reconstructing dishes from memory and instinct and a lot of failed experiments.
The first time I tried to make a proper Mauritian fish curry I added the spices in the wrong order and at the wrong heat and ended up with something that smelled almost right but tasted like a rough approximation. My mother, who I called afterwards, told me I'd burned the masala and that you can't come back from a burned masala. She was right. You can't.
That failure taught me more than any successful first attempt could have. I know what the spices should smell like at each stage. I know the moment before burned and I know how to pull back. You only learn that by crossing the line at least once.
The best cooks I know are relaxed about failure. They treat a bad dish as data, not a verdict.
Following recipes precisely rarely produces the best results for me. It produces correct results, which is different. The dishes I'm most proud of are the ones where I understood the recipe well enough to deviate from it. I knew that the tomatoes I had were more acidic than whatever the writer used, so I adjusted. That intuition only comes from having made something badly and worked out why.
Cooking is the activity I'm most comfortable being bad at, which I think is the precondition for getting good. I am still bad at pastry. Pastry is still winning.
The recipes from home, on scraps of paper in my mother's handwriting in a drawer in the kitchen, I'm working through them. Some are a list of ingredients with no quantities. That part I don't mind. The quantities were never the point.