Yes. There's alot of recipes you can go off of with it .
Yes, it's true. Schools do allow topics based on religious things, but it depends on the topics though. If the topics are weird, I advise you to not write letters based on weird topics, ok?
Symbolism (not sure if it’s correct:) )
The gerund in this sentence is "learning". A gerund is a verb form which is acting as a noun, in this case after the preposition "in".