Unfortunately nobody can really answer your questions as well as you can yourself, because nobody but you knows what you want to achieve.
Personally I would never use pagination even if the fate of the world depended on it, but then I also wouldn't use a database or PHP when it can be avoided, and I have no idea why you're trying to code everything from the back end to the front end yourself when there are plenty of recipe templates and themes already out there.
I think it would actually be less of a chore, and would provide a far better, more interesting/personalized experience for visitors, to simply write a blog on Wordpress.com, adding 10 recipes per day, at least if there's some genuine enthusiasm and knowledge about the subject, than grinding away on what seems to be just another recipe dump like hundreds of others that already exist.
To specifically address your questions:
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"whether I should begin with recipes.php?page=0 or recipes.php?page=1 as the first page, does either option matter significantly?"
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Machines typically count from 0; humans from 1. That's it. Just use whatever works in your code, because no internet user, including you, has ever cared whether a URL has a 0 or 1.
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"I have read in a few places then when dealing with potentially hundreds of pages, using OFFSET can cause issue?"
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Why would you even have hundreds of pages? It's a scientific fact that no human in their right mind (who wasn't stealing/scraping content) has ever clicked further than page 5 of anything.
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"when it comes to the navigation itself, is it best (in your experience) to just have numerical pages listed or should I also include a 'PREVIOUS' and 'NEXT' link on the navigation structure?"
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Pagination is always the worst solution - almost nobody reads past page one anyway, and nobody at all cares about more than 100 items of anything, so even if you don't want to lazy load, just put 100 results on one page and let people find other stuff in other ways, such as categories or 'related' suggestions.
If you absolutely must use the worst, most tedious navigation method ever, you can again answer your own question - is it nicer when there's a big PREVIOUS and NEXT button to click, or is it better when you have to exactly hit an 8x8 pixel arrow or number?
You're a user too; if you think something makes things easier, do it, and if you think it makes things harder, don't do it. Certainly never let 'style', which is subjective anyway, override user experience.