The best part of cooking might be — MIGHT be — the idea that you can basically try anything you want. Short of ingredients being crazy expensive (like truffles), the process being prohibitively involved (like mole), or the recipe requiring tools you don’t have (like… check that, if Pampered Chef doesn’t make something you need, it’s probably not worth the hassle), you can make just about anything.
When I was a kid, one of my aunts bought this cookbook that had recipes for stuff like Twinkies and Nutter Butters. It blew my mind! I was like, “why would those companies just give those recipes away? Are they stolen? Did someone rob Colonel Sanders’ vault for his fried chicken recipe? Is it even legal to have this book? We gotta get rid of this thing!”
I didn’t know food worked, and I didn’t understand that, with a little curiosity and experience*, there are people who can figure out what goes into a Nutter Butter. Or those freakin’ Red Lobster Cheddar Bay biscuits that should come with a warning label telling you they’re addictive. And when they figure that out (or creat their own recipes), they share them. Today, you don’t even need to buy cookbooks: everything’s online! Google “Red Lobster biscuit recipe” and you get like 15 different versions. You get _options_!
It’s not just about recreating guilty pleasures so you don’t have to feel the shame of going to Outback because you need that brown bread and whipped butter (3,830,000 results in Google, btw). It’s about getting a craving and satisfying it yourself. It’s about trying something new, just to see what it’s all about. It’s about finding a different version of something you didn’t like and seeing if a different preparation maybe matches your tastes better.
You just need to try doing it yourself.