@pro99 - Please read Google's guidelines on how microformatting and schema are assessed. The hrecipe plugin implements a subset of Google's requirements *exactly.*
Thus, you are absolutely correct: text outside the enclosing div will not assumed part of a recipe, and won't be shown as a recipe. It will, however, be shown as part of ordinary search results, provided your blog ranks.
If your blog doesn't rank, no recipe plugin is going to help you, Google states that quite plainly. The markup is to enhance the results, not to determine ranking.
Whether your entire blog post should be considered as part of a recipe is a matter of opinion. I use the "index card" rule; a recipe should more or less fit on a 3x5 index card. Other people may have other opinions. Note that my opinion is shared by Google. If you were to ask a specialist in semantic technology/web, I'm pretty sure most of them would agree as well. If you're chasing SEO, all bets are off.
Also, parsing existing recipes is very hard to do with a computer. You can find various discussions of this on line. My recommendation is to outsource the data entry for existing recipes, then tweak the results yourself.
Feel free to contact via the hrecipe.com website or via email.