Hi Tei, thanks for your note! My process for measuring the time to prepare dishes has changed over the years, but since I started doing YouTube videos on a regular basis I log the time based on the raw unedited footage. For example, if I'm washing/peeling/cutting vegetables, and mixing a sauce I'd add all that time up which becomes the "prep time". Likewise the "cook time" includes the duration that the stove is turned on. By the time I record the video I've made the recipe several times before, so I have that as an advantage, but this is why I generally pad the times a bit. For example with this recipe, the recorded prep/cook time was 20 minutes, but I tacked on an extra 5 minutes. Perhaps it's best to think of these numbers as the best case scenario as it's going to depend on a bunch of factors like skill level, the layout of your kitchen, and how fast you work. If you know it typically takes x% longer for you to prepare than the times I give, you could just add that extra time in when planning the meal?

(I think this is a general problem of professional food blogs: they have fine tuned the recipe and optimized the process (like in tv cooking shows) but that's not how normal people work.