Small World! I have a copy of her book Gourmet Vegetarian Cooking from 1982, bought when I was a broke student. I had already planned earlier today to use one of its recipes for dinner tonight: Brown Nut Rissoles. !!!!

It's been a great source of inspiration and I know a few of the recipes essentially by heart. My main comment now is that the ingredients lists reflect the range of veg and herbs that you typically could find in a 1982 UK shop, and I often substitute more exotic ingredients that weren't readily available then.

As others have said elsewhere here, after many years you typically don't need to slavishly follow the steps in a recipe (except perhaps for baking where precise ratios of ingredients can be important). For some cooks (notably Delia Smith) I've simplified their recipes over the years to reduce the number of discrete steps, utensils and cooking time involved. The results might not look as camera-ready perfect as the pic in the books, but the taste can be indistinguishable, especially when throwing something together quickly for a weekday evening meal.

This is exactly what we do too. I even have a hobby of collapsing Julia Child (and now David Chang) recipes into something... manageable in say 2 hrs? I did the David Chang wings and yeah the Super Bowl party was destroyed by them (omfg never had wings like this) but good lawd they took a lot of effort, spread over multiple days.