What if you had to buy recipes from vendors? They don't have to be expensive, but just have nominal prices. Needing to buy them will give you a better sense of what you have and what you don't, what you can expect from skills you still haven't learned, and allow for a better relation with the many possibilities of several skills (the ones related to cooking come to mind in the first place, but are not the only ones).
As it is now, recipes appear automatically inside your tools' windows. They depend on the tool, how many times you used the tool and which skills you have. (The only exception for this are compounds, which you need to "discover".)
This way, you don't feel a special accomplishment when you acquire new recipes, unless you know beforehand that cooking so many meals will land you such and such new recipes.
"Buying" is not the only possibility. You could get recipes as bonus items from harvesting, mining or whatever. Recipes would be like notes or scripts, with the verb "Learn". Once you "Learn" them they would dissapear from your inventory and go to their respective tool, where they would look like they do now.
But if we have to buy them, recipes that we still can't learn would have the same kind of sign that today identify tools we can't use yet.
I hope I'm clear about the idea. It's not to make recipes more expensive, just to give a sense of achievement and to know them better.