That said, is anyone actually measuring a tablespoon of oil? I just pour a glug of a size proportional to the ingredients and adjust as needed.
If you take a university student who has just left home and never cooked for themselves and tell them "just pour a glug proportional to the ingredients"...that's pretty close to useless for them, especially since they don't yet an intuition for what things you can freehand (and how much you can freehand them) and which things you shouldn't.
After all, you (probably) wouldn't ever say "I just open the Morton's salt and pour a glug in" because getting salt wrong even by relatively small amounts has a big impact on the final dish.
That said, I agree with you that recipe writers usually do a poor job of laying which things fall more on the "suggested amount, you can just eye ball it" end of the spectrum and which ones are "you should really pull out at least a spoon to get close on this one".
Not GP and I wouldn't phrase it quite like that - but I definitely would. You can give a rough indication, but salt should be added to taste.
(Unless we're talking about baking, where for one thing you can't taste until the end anyway. In that case yes of course measure, still to taste, but the feedback loop is longer.)
No, but you do, almost universally, say "salt to taste." Which is a different way to say the same thing.
I can't think of any situation where I would want more than a literal tablespoon of oil for cooking the first veggies thrown in (usually onion). By the time the onions have begun to caramelize there's is enough water that the original tablespoon of oil is no longer significant.
Where did I say it wasn't?
Anyway, about adding water, I respectfully disagree. The oil is necessary and it really is a tablespoon in a shallow and uncrowded pan with the lid off.
EDIT: I'm specifically talking about browning some onions when called for as an initial step in a recipe, not for making a huge batch of them for use as a condiment. Cutting the onion into finer pieces also speeds things up.
The idea is that adding water, raising it to a boil, and covering the pan reduces the amount of time needed to raise the temperature of the onions to the caramelization point, more than offsetting the amount of time needed to remove the water itself. That plus adding some baking soda near the end reduces the overall time considerably.
Slow cook them first for a few hours at a low temperature and then caramelize after. All your onion in a dry pot. Don't add water. Strain them when done and you have... soggy pale onions. Heat up the biggest pan you have and add some butter to do the caramelization (don't crowd the pan like they do in their video). Add some good balsamic vinegar and brown sugar while you're at it. Be sure to make a huge batch so you can freeze some for later. Don't bag and freeze before letting the onions come to room temperature. It's a lot of water in them onions man, but you can use that strained out water for a vegetable stock!
I don't like them like the Americans do but there is lots of to play with it. (I've even started boiling onions whole before I use them in a bunch of other dishes)
Highly recommend it.
I have a few recipes that call for browning onions in a cup (or more!) of ghee.
Works wonderfully. Still takes forever.
There are many ways to brown onions, all of them suck. I tried the "boil in water first" method while back, that works OK ish.
I've helped cook at a camp where 500 people were going to eat the meal. That requires very different thinking from large family cooking where at most 20 people are eating, and a small family is different as well.
Agreed on meat, but I consistently see way-too-small amounts of oil suggested for cooking veggies, too. It's like every recipe writer online got together and decided that 1) they must specify oil quantities for those steps, but 2) the quantity must never exceed one tablespoon.