Many of us are food lovers and some are into experimenting with food items. For new recipes do you turn to recipe books/online guides? Do you follow step to step as advised or do you skip and add/modify accordingly? I modify a lot and find that the resultant dish is equally awesome as the suggested dish.
My wife is a good cook. However, she's seldom using any recipe. . I once had bought a book of recipe of our local delicacies for her and she had cooked some of those foods published. I encourage her to put it in writing of the foods which I love best for I want to share it to my friends.
I do look up recipes all the time as I am not a very good cook. I actually started to learn to cook when I got married so I did take a bit to make my first dish which turned out pretty good. Now that I have learned a few dishes and want to keep learnig and experimenting I do make some modifications which turn out to be good.
I modify depending on my taste preferences. One time I attempted to bake a cheese cake and I added three times more cracker dust because I like a thick crust. The recipe also required adding a few drops of lemon but I didn't feel as if it would taste good so I excluded that part from the process. It turned out pretty good. I don't exclude parts that are necessary, though.