Great points, Waffle.
Though I love how many recipes there are, waiting for ages for the cooking select thing to open is such a drag. I love the idea of having to learn recipes individually from cookbooks. Once you've done the recipe a few times from a cook book, it makes sense that your sim could do it from memory. Then your sim could teach recipes to other sims!
"learn how to make [recipe]" would also be a really good goal for the cooking career too! It would add a lot of challenge to it.
Sims being generated knowing certain recipes based on their hometowns would make the recipes they cooked autonomously give you more of a sense of place when travelling, too.
