Five meals you should be able to cook without looking

There's a difference between knowing recipes and owning meals.

A recipe is something you follow. A meal you own is something you can make tired, slightly drunk, with whatever is in the fridge, for one person or six, without a screen in front of you.

Five is enough for a life. These are the five I would pick.

1. Eggs, properly

Scrambled and an omelette. Both are technique rather than ingredients and both are ruined by heat.

Scrambled: low heat, butter, constant movement, off the heat while they still look slightly underdone. They carry on cooking in the pan. Most people's scrambled eggs are one minute past right.

An omelette: hot pan, briefly, folded and still soft in the middle. Two eggs, not three.

Get these two and breakfast, a late dinner and a fridge-is-empty meal are all solved.

2. A tray roast

The highest effort-to-result ratio in cooking. Protein and hard vegetables in one tin, hot oven, one turn halfway, done.

Chicken thighs with potatoes, onion and lemon. Sausages with peppers and red onion. A piece of pork with apples. It's the same operation every time and it works with almost anything.

Two rules: give everything room — crowded food steams instead of roasting — and use a hotter oven than you think, around 200°C.

3. A pasta sauce from a cupboard

Not a jar. Tinned tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, salt, and time.

Garlic gently in oil until it smells, tomatoes in, break them up, then leave it on a low heat for twenty-five minutes while you do something else. Salt at the end. A knob of butter stirred in off the heat, if you want it to taste like a restaurant.

From there: add chilli, add anchovies, add sausage meat, add cream. It's a base, not a recipe.

4. A chilli or a stew

One large pot, browned meat, onions, something acidic, something liquid, and two hours of neglect.

The two things that separate good from grey: brown the meat properly in batches — crowded meat boils and never browns — and give it longer than you want to.

It's better the next day, it freezes, and it feeds people. This is the meal that covers having friends over.

5. A stir fry

The fastest hot meal there's, and the one people most reliably ruin by treating it like a stew.

Everything chopped before the pan gets hot. Pan as hot as it goes. Protein first, out. Hard vegetables, then soft. Protein back in. Sauce last, thirty seconds.

Total cooking time under six minutes. If it's taking longer, the pan isn't hot enough and you're steaming it.

The things behind the five

Salt. Most home cooking is under-seasoned. Salt in stages as you go, not all at the end.

Acid. A squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar at the end of almost anything savoury makes it taste finished. This is the single biggest gap between home and restaurant food.

Heat. Domestic cooks use too little of it. Most pans are put on at medium, and most browning needs more.

One sharp knife. Sharpened, not new. A blunt knife is slower, worse and considerably more dangerous.

Looking for something specific? Delicious.com — a sister site — has around nine thousand recipes and will build a grocery list from whatever you pick.