The most important thing I can teach people is to not follow recipes – only sometimes use them as a basic guide. If they insist on following recipes, then I can't really help them much, but they can find ten million recipes on the internet for free.
That's because, in my experience, those people who rely on recipes never get good at cooking. They sometimes have good luck with a particular recipe. But as soon as there's a small change in the quality of ingredients or the cooking environment, then their recipe stops producing such good results. But they don't understand why, so they don't know what they have to change to make it work. (Also it's hard for them to be versatile or creative because they don't know how to safely adjust the recipe for different numbers of guests or a different kitchen or to add different ingredients. They just guess and hope).
