Recipes are exactly like modular furniture. Think of a recipe along two dimensions: ingredients & cuisine. Each dimension has a set of attributes -- for ingredients, think about their texture and how they would be chopped (rough, diced, fine, etc.) and for the cuisine, think about the spices, the herbs, the heat level, etc. Creating a recipe is nothing more than picking ingredients, adding flavor elements and cooking them in a certain style. If you were to hold a few attributes constant and vary others, you get a completely different dish. For example, North Indian cuisine uses a flavor base of onion, garlic, ginger, chilis and tomato (the "masala"), Cajun dishes use onion, celery & green peppers (the "trinity"), French and American dishes often use carrot, celery & onion (the "mirepoix"). The same ingredient may be finely chopped for a soup or chopped in julienne style (long strips) for Asian stir-frys. In my book, I provide a handy table that organizes these attributes for each type of cuisine. Changing a recipe is as easy as swapping out one of these modules for another.