You will learn and adapt and come up with your own dishes along the way. Everyone follows a recipe to a degree, some have it in their head, or know from experience what can be substituted or even works better. The difference between baking and cooking is that when baking it is key to follow the recipe quantities and ingredients accurately as they all have to work together for the best desired result. Cooking lets you experiment, adjust and learn. Once you begin to eyeball a it few times you will have confidence that it typically won’t mess up your dish much and you’ll have even less dishes to do!!
I also want to add a couple easy, delicious inexpensive recipes here. We eat a lot of rice and well, white rice can get boring.
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/33...-spanish-rice/
You also can turn this into an easy main dish shrimp and sausage jambalaya by starting off with peppers and celery along with the onion and then adding the sausage and shrimp as it simmers away.
https://www.budgetbytes.com/yellow-jasmine-rice/
For the yellow rice, I just use some garlic powder instead of the minced garlic. Also, I just put all the ingredients in the a rice cooker and turn it on. So easy and tasty.