redirects not working

Looking at my 404 log, I see that some visitors are mistakenly tacking “recipes” onto the end of my wp folder name “blog”. I have tried (and failed) to add a redirect via cpanel.

So I tried directly adding the following above all the ithemes security coding in the htaccess file for the wp folder. Alas, it didn’t work.

# trying to redirect /blog/recipes to /recipes
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^\blog\recipes\$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ https://mydomain.com/recipes/$1 [L,R=301]

htaccess coding makes me shudder. There seem to be so many variables. For anyone who actually understands htaccess coding, I would like a wildcard redirect from /blog/recipes/ to /recipes/

Please advise how I can achieve this. Thank you.

E Morris, etherwork [dot] net [slash] blog <<purposely unlinked in attempt to keep spammers at bay (there’s a really good reason that I have iThemes Security plugin. Thanks, guys, for helping to rid me of the bruteforce attacks)

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/better-wp-security/