After 15 years of (sporadic) cooking, I feel like I am still totally dependent on recipes. So how do I get away from this? For me the answer has beeen to cook more often and to pay attention when I cook. To use my senses and judge things for myself, rather than wondering if I've done it "right." (I'm still working on this part.) I still rely on cookbooks for inspiration and guidance, but I try to put my spin on the recipe and am slowly building up a repertoire of my favorites, which I cook regularly and sometimes (gasp!) without even looking at the written instructions. But my question is, how can a book help beginners gain confidence, without making them co-dependent (as mamster noted)? Maybe this dependence comes from the gap in our collective kitchens. Many of us didn't grow up cooking at someone's elbow, so we don't have an ingrained knowledge acquired over years of observation and helpful guidance. This may also explain the recent popularity of memoirs with recipes (Reichl, Hesser, et al). If you learned to cook from a book, as I did, it's hard to break that dependence. So how do you get people thinking about cooking? More and more, I'm beginning to feel that you can't get it from a book. A book might be a good start, but it can't replace an experienced cook showing you, correcting you, etc. And it certainly can't replace the social and critical feedback you get from sharing that meal with others.