You have two options which I’ll call the “quick and dirty” and the “sustainable.”
Quick and Dirty
You could manually-create the Categories Page with many left-aligned images with captions and the Link URL field for each image linked to a set of pages where you repeat that process with images linking to individual recipes.
If you have a small, set number of recipes, this will get the job done, but if you plan on adding, editing, or removing categories and recipes, this solution will be borderline-impossible to maintain. Which leads us to…
Sustainable
This requires significantly more upfront work and WordPress know-how, but will serve you well. Here’s how I would handle it.
- Create a new “Recipes” custom post type using
register_post_type(). -
Create a new “Food Type” custom taxonomy to the Recipes post type with
register_taxonomy().- These first two steps will keep your admin clean and keep your recipes and Food Types separate from Posts and Categories, respectively.
-
Install the Taxonomy Images plugin.
- Add a “Recipe Categories” Page Template to your theme that displays the taxonomy images and labels for each term in your Food Types taxonomy. Each image and label will link to that term’s taxonomy archive page.
- Assign a featured image to each Recipe post you make (Make sure that you’ve enabled post thumbnails when you register your post type in Step 1.). Finally, create a custom template (via the Template Hierarchy) that applies to all the Food Type Term Archives and displays the Featured Image and Title of each recipe as a link.
VOILA!