It's sort of a loose process of mine.

I have a curious mind that demands to know how things work, not just be told to do things.

So if I was told in a recipe to fry a piece of meat, I would stop and research what happens when you fry meat and why do you fry meat in the first place?

From that I would learn a few simple concepts like the Maillard reaction or how proteins change shape when they are heated.

From there my curiosity would lead me to a more questions like why do we cook meat until it changes color?

Or I might make a stew, and learn that to thicken up the gravy, you'll add some flour. So then I'll research what is happening inside of gravy when you add flour; why doesn't it seem to thicken until it's heated? That would lead me to learn how carbohydrates transform in different ways under different conditions, or how emulsifications work.

That's really it in a nutshell, just cook daily but always stop to try to figure out what's actually happening in the steps I'm following.

By slowly developing that deeper understanding, it made it so I could eventually just throw the recipes away, because I had learned so much intuitively that I just didn't need them anymore. It also gave me that skill of being able to look at a proposed recipe and just laugh because you know it's not going to work or taste good.