Experienced home cooks are not memorising more recipes than you. They are working from a handful of structures — patterns where the technique stays fixed and the ingredients rotate. Learn five of them and most weeknights stop requiring a recipe at all.

1. The stir-fry

Hot pan, protein cooked and removed, aromatics, vegetables in order of hardness, protein back in, sauce last. Roughly twelve minutes.

• Sauce baseline: two parts soy sauce, one part vinegar, a pinch of sugar, a splash of water.
• Keep the pan crowded and you steam instead of sear. Cook in two batches if needed.

2. The sheet-pan roast

Everything tossed in oil and salt, spread in a single layer, roasted hot at around 220°C. Dense vegetables go in first, quick-cooking items join partway through.

3. The one-pot pasta or grain bowl

Cook the starch, build a quick sauce from fat plus aromatics plus one acid, then combine while the starch is still hot so it absorbs the sauce. Reserve a little cooking water to loosen it.

4. The braise-in-a-hurry

Brown the protein, deglaze with liquid, add a tin of tomatoes or stock, and simmer covered. Twenty-five minutes gives you a decent result with chicken thighs, sausage, or beans, though not with tough cuts of beef.

5. The egg dish

Frittata, shakshuka, fried rice, omelette. Eggs turn leftovers into a meal faster than anything else in the kitchen, and they forgive almost any ingredient combination.

Putting it together

Look at your anchor ingredient, pick the structure that suits it, and search for a specific recipe only if you want the exact seasoning. This is also why browsing by category and cuisine is often more useful than searching for a dish by name — you are choosing a structure, then filling it in.