Mark Bittman writes about the stages of learning how to cook and you are pretty advanced relative to others. Many of us haven't gotten to the point where we can realistically come up with ideas based on tastes because we don't know how they interact. Generalizing these ideas requires understanding how and why things work, which is exactly why Alton Brown is so useful to so many people. He breaks down the reasoning behind something so that you can generalize it the next time, or in a different dish, or apply a principle to something new altogether.
EG: chicken, beef, tomato, onion, peppers, mushroom, cheese, rice, quinoa, pasta, potato, carrot, broccoli, spinach, asparagus, corn, sauce, etc.
Make sure you have a good stock of different spices, salt, and pepper.
Start with something simple like just chicken pasta and each meal add in something from above suited towards your taste. As you run out of ingredients you'll realize you can still make good dishes. If you run out of pasta you can skip it completely or sub it out with quiona.
I often play the "lets see what I can make with what is still in the fridge" game :D
To go a bit philosophical, you have to lose the fear of engaging with your food and the cooking process. Don't be scared to play with your food while it's cooking. Smell it often, listen to the noises it makes, don't be worried about moving it around the pan and even take notice of how it moves - is it sticking to the pan? Does it seem a little dry? Does it smell good? Start doing this with the simplest of things - some oil in a pan and a steak or sausages, for example.
Don't worry about following recipes to the exact letter all the time, unless you're doing something like baking where the chemistry is more important to get accurate. If your time isn't exact or the temperature is a little off or you use more than a tablespoon of oil, see what happens. See what happens if you add salt, or if you don't. Observe it while it's happening. Don't be scared to taste something off the pan. If it doesn't taste good, ask yourself why? Then ask yourself how you might fix it.
Once you're not afraid to do that, cooking becomes a lot more fun and intuitive. Then you can follow recipes while engaging with them and the food.
I feel like this is something that many people who hate cooking or who are scared of cooking miss. Cooking shouldn't be a "follow the instructions to the letter otherwise one wrong step and boom!" process. Instead it's a highly interactive, very sensory thing.
I'm starting to realize now that it's just a stupid fear I need to overcome. I'm glad this thread forced me to think more about my attitude towards cooking.
(Yes, sometimes is a really hard game.)
A flatmate has a book called simply "Saucen" (German for "Sauces") which provides a good basis for many meals.
I've been trying to learn how to cook ever since I moved roughly 3 months ago. My early attempts at replicating others' recipes had paid off decently so I attempted the hack-stuff-together approach on a couple of occasions. It did _not_ go well. :-/
I ended up with a ton of wasted ingredients not to mention the significant amount to time spent in prepping and later, cleaning up.
That said, I agree that (with a bit of experience) this approach to cooking is a lot more fun. As a comment elsewhere on the page says, cooking for yourself could sometimes be a pain (especially after you get home from work) and thinking of it as a side project really helps.
I have some pretty basic recipes I cook if I'm a bit tired from work, I can make them without really thinking (e.g. diced chicken + green beans & cream + pesto.) Fortunately, the nearest shop is about 2 minutes detour from my route home, so I can wander in and buy the things I'm missing.
I think one way to build up intuition is to cook a recipe with a very short list of ingredients multiple times, with small variations (like the size of cutting things up or cooking time or whatever).
One thing Good Eats consistently does is talk about whether an ingredient has a functional purpose in a recipe, and what that purpose is. Other cooking resources do that too, but usually not as well.
This is obviously a rather trivial example, but hopefully you see how generalizing this (and similar nuggets of information) can help.
Alton Brown is probably not an ideal source for recipes for you since he really goes all-out with ingredients and prep, but he's a fun way to learn about the science of cooking. His methods are hacker-ish, and that he doesn't follow same-old-same-old recipes helped me to stop worrying about doing things the "right" way.