How to read a cookbook, or a recipe. I can follow one and hope for the best, or use it it remind myself of details of a dish I've made before, but the way most recipes and cookbooks are written is crazy to me. I can't visualize the final result at all, even with pictures. This is just about the only arena where the video format seems to be better than text, and that's outrageous.
Why would the amount of something and the instructions for it he in different places? In recipes where you make a dry mix and a wet mix completely separately and then comine them, why aren't those different subsections? Why in all the hemispheres of the earth is the oven temperature, usually the first thing you have to attend to, not the first line of the recipe?
They're not written in chronological order or in logistical subsections. I keep having to flip back to the ingredient list to find out how much of something I'll need (when I'm reading it, I know how to assemble my mise en place, thank you). The best thing I've found is to rewrite the whole recipe myself in a way that makes sense to me:
Two columns, one with ingredients and their anounts grouped by subsection and chronologically within that subsection; the second with instructions for what to do with those ingredients. It's easy for me to tell at a glance, oh, here's the part I can do in advance, here's me preparing the Holy Trinity, here's the spice blend I add midway, here's the part where I can take a smoke break, here's the garnish at the end.
PS. Time signatures are all about which dance steps you can do to the music, in my experience.