Learn five dinners you can cook without a recipe
A friend has invited you to do this with them.
A dish becomes yours around the fifth time you make it, when you stop reading and start tasting. Five of them, learned properly, are enough to feed yourself and other people well for the rest of your life.
GentleUnder £100 / $130A few weeksIndoorsAlone or with others
Someone who has done it
Diane Morrisey says she could not cook when she married, and taught herself. She has no connection with this challenge; her story shows where a handful of well-learned dishes can lead.
How to start
- Choose five dinners you would like to own, including one tray dinner and one soup or stew.
- Cook the first one twice in a week, exactly as written, then change one thing.
- Add a dish a week, and cook one of the five for somebody else once you know it by heart.
Where to go
- NHS Healthier Families: easy dinner ideas UK
- MyPlate Kitchen: recipes from the US Department of Agriculture US
We opened these links on 7 October 2026 and found them to be what we say. Dates, places and prices are on the official page, where they stay up to date.
Plan this
Pick a day, or a month, and we will set out how to get ready, step by step, with a date and a reason for each. Projects run over months and stall without a rhythm, so the plan sets milestones you can see.
Read next
Geoff Collis traded the flight deck for a bakery bench in Melbourne's north-east
How an airline pilot learned to bake during the pandemic, went back to flying, then chose the bakery for good, and how to bake your first loaf this week or turn a baking habit into something bigger.
Ron Wallace grew the world's heaviest pumpkin in his first season under glass
Ron Wallace's 3,156lb pumpkin took the world record a week after Ian Paton's 2,856lb 'Bagheera'. How the two growers got there, what a gardening trial found, and how to grow a first pumpkin of your own next year.