Haha, yeah, I realized I made it a bit too hard with the recipe obfuscation. Newer version I'm working on gives you the health potion recipe from the start, and drops are way better too, so that helps some, I think. For the text box thing, you can double click it to do text entry instead of the scroll, but I suppose that's not clear. Maybe some more tooltips would help? I had hoped the text description of what you were doing to the materials would help people figure out that you need to switch the materials with the numbers below, but I suppose that didn't work.
I have considered recipes between runs, as I thought it might be annoying. I did not have enough time to implement it anyways, but you're probably right, there should be some meta progression there. Thanks for playing!