I'm a 62 year old married grampa starting my fourth career. I've been in the Navy (good chow), down on the farm (more good chow), and making meals since I was a kid (some not so good). I have a casual approach to cooking and I don't obsess about the last milligram of some particular ingredient. In fact, I have some recipes that I call "sorta recipes" because they only resemble recipes. They contain statements like "stand back and toss some in". I gained an interest in vegetarian cooking because of personal health issues. Vegetarian cooking is not intended to make vegetables taste like meat, although I have sometimes been able to do that. Its about making vegetable dishes tasty and appealing. When there was more money in the budget we had meat in the goulash! I learned to put in what was available at the time. I still have a laid back attitude about exact ingredients and exact ratios of those ingredients. A vegetarian chili that sometimes has the carnivores believing I finally added meat and vegetarians whipping me for putting meat in my vegetarian chili (its listed as an option). I have a "sorta recipe" for this that is used now in five states. You get in trouble real fast by not following directions closely when you are baking things like cakes and pies. Oh well. Maybe I'll catch on to that, too.