I'm an experienced programmer, but not terribly experienced with Access forms, so I'm not surprised if I'm doing things in an unorthodox way! And this is where I really appreciate help from you all not to shoot myself in the foot.
The subform at the top is actually a search tool, so choosing the various parameters (Dinner, Main, Vegan, etc.) filters the list of recipes. Initially I had this happening on the form itself, and it worked fine until I changed the parameters and suddenly my previous menu selections got filtered out. Lol. So, I decided to consolidate the search functionality onto a subform. Other than the stupid error of binding the recipe combobox, it seems to work, although it's duplicated effort to find a recipe up above and then go down below and choose it for a particular day. I suppose I could try to make that happen programmatically.
I have other forms with subforms that work like you describe. Do you think it's a bad idea to use it this way?