Can I create permalinks like this: /%post_type%/%postname%/

When you’re registering a custom post type in WordPress, one of the arguments is ‘rewrite’, which allows you to set up a slug for your custom post type. In your example above, you would set the rewrite argument to 'rewrite' => array('slug' => 'recipes') to create a URL structure like http://example.com/recipes/general-tsos-chicken

You can also add custom post types with a plugin like Custom Post Types UI. That plugin has a field in the advanced options for adding a rewrite slug.