Help with database schema design
I would suggest some reading on normalization and many-to-many relationships.

One problem you're probably running into is figuring out how many fields to include with your current ingredients and directions lists. Ingredients_list with ingredients_list_id, ingredient1, ingredient2, and ingredient3 will be insufficient for any recipe needing more than three ingredients. Bumping up the column count to N doesn't work either, when Forrest's Fancy Fruitcake needs N+1 ingredients. 

Following the pattern shown in the many-to-many link, you could link ingredients back to the recipe id, where each row in ingredients_list contains one recipe_id and one ingredient_id. Then (simplifying to ignore joins) getting all ingredients for a recipe would look like SELECT [ingredient_id] FROM [ingredient_list] WHERE [recipe_id] = 1234.

Overall, I might change the schema to something like this:


users 


user_id 
user_email 
user_password


recipes


recipe_id
user_id
recipe_name


ingredients_list


recipe_id
ingredient_id
ingredient_qty


directions_list


recipe_id
direction_text
direction_number


ingredients


ingredient_id
ingredient_name