On sticking to recipes
While one of the most important qualia for a chef is to be able to improvise, in fact it is always driven by experience, not intuition.
One could throw random things together and apply heat, but they want turn into a perfectly cooked steak with plated variations of seasonal veggies without experience of doing the pairing and cooking steaks.
A good way to build up such experience and turn it into an intuition is to stick to a recipe, do it once or twice and reflect on things that you understand, or would like to change, or don't understand.