Feeling a little more strongly about cooking

I used to be really ambivalent about cooking.  All I wanted was a tremendously precise recipe to follow so I could stop paying attention and just do as it said.  It also freed me from actually being responsible for my 'creations' since as long as I follow the recipe perfectly it is not my fault.  Somehow in the past few years I have gotten a lot more possessive about cooking than that.

For Christmas Wendy and I got some 'soup cooking aids' which were essentially a tube of beans/peas/lentils and some spices with instructions on how to turn them into soup.  They look like this:

I started off suspicious at the extremely high cooking times and large list of ingredients I was supposed to provide.  I didn't have everything on hand so I ended up fudging a lot and making things up and the soups ended up sucking.

Damn soup mixes
They suck
I make great soup, and I just wanted to use them up, and I got bad soup
Not my fault
Blame the soup mix!

Kinda weird, playing the blame game with a random pile of soup mixes.  I never got this way before though, so I guess somehow cooking has become something I am defensive about.  It is a big part of my job at the moment so I guess that makes sense but still I never really thought I would get invested in cooking.  Somehow it always seemed like my attitude would forever remain "Meh, I won't die from what I make.  Good 'nuff."