Occasionally I'll have a psychic flash of insight - but what does my common sense tell me?
There is a food for every season and fresh seasonal ingredients are the way to go. Keep it simple or you can wind up with a butt awful mess.
In my researches to find the origin of recipes and ingredients, I've found that much of what we think of as ordinary food started off in some exotic place and only became widespread at a time of significant cultural change - the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Mongol Empire, the British Empire, the Zulu Empire and more. In recent times, native English cuisine was greatly influenced by the spices and recipes brought back from India. This led to BBC nutritional educational programming in the latter part of the 20th century, which introduced the grassroots British to Continental cuisine and much more.
Southern cooking in the US was greatly influenced by Native American tribes and the slave trade. In a curious twist of fate, the foods of Africa mingled with Native American, Asian, French, Spanish and English dishes to create Creole, Cajun, Tex-Mex, Soul Food, Lowcountry and Floribbean regional variations of Southern cuisine.
I was raised using Southern family recipes supplemented by "The Joy of Cooking". In the mid 60's, my mother's enrollment in the original Weight Watcher's program provided a bit of diversion as everything on the diet had to be cooked without what we considered essential ingredients - sugars & fats.
Julia Child wasn't even on TV until I was a teen, but her "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" is very readable and an excellent way to learn cooking on your own.
If you wish to venture into the realm of haute cuisine, Thomas Keller's "Ad Hoc at Home" is a great stepping stone before exploring "The Bouchon Cookbook" and finally rise to the heights with his "The French Laundry Cookbook".
I rarely prepare a new dish exactly as laid out in a single recipe. Often I will research and compare differing recipes before determining the quantities and specific ingredients, not to mention the cooking processes. I suppose the first time I can remember having formally followed this procedure was when I wanted to recreate the cornbread recipe my grandmother used to prepare on her farm in Mississippi. My mother had lost the recipe long before, but I knew that the use of (wheat) flour in cornbread was a relatively recent innovation and searched for recipes made without flour.