cookbook assignment

Would appreciate any suggestions on refactoring or ways of simplifying my code. This assignment was pretty hard for me and I think my messy code reflects that a bit. I also noticed a really weird bug yesterday that treats the recipe_id and ingredient_id as string values rather than integers. I have no idea why it is doing this!
This is a tough one. Honestly the most common approach would be to use javascript to submit the sub form. This way they would never be taken away from the page.