Cooking is as creative a process as writing code. Now, most of the time, we have a well-defined end goal ("something edible", "implement feature F") and a start

Cooking is as creative a process as writing code. Now, most of the time, we have a well-defined end goal ("something edible", "implement feature F") and a starting point )(raw ingredients; the existing code base). But, how we get from the starting to the end point is not wholly prescribed and what goes in the middle is creative. And most of the time, the actual level of creativity is pretty low. Now, in one of those cases, you probably have sufficient experience that the lack of exact roadmap doesn't faze you. And apparently in the other, it does. There are more detailed and less "leave this out" recipes there. I don't, genuinely, know where to find them, but that's what I used to use when I learned to cook. It MAY be worth investigating recipe collections designed for home ec classes, as presumably they are designed for the less experienced food maker.