• Interrogate them if it’s necessary. Until they stop with the “Do as much as you like” and instead instruct you with “Put about a cup of X and about a quarter of Y by volume”. If you got this you are nore prepared for the measure by eye and feel.

    I get around this by asking them to make the specifics dish, gathering all the ingredients for them, then weighing everything before and after to get exact numbers.

    It really is a matter of “do as much as you like”, but without an intuition on how different ingredients taste and affect the dish at varying quantities, you’re not going to know how much you like. So getting that starting point to experiment with is very important.