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PhilipL comments on Procedural Knowledge Gaps, part 2 - Less Wrong
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Pasta: Tasty, cheap and moderately healthy, and easy to cook. If you can make instant noodles, you're mostly there already. Start a pot of boiling water, with a bit of salt (optional, I've never done this.) Put noodles in, stir occasionally once they're mostly submerged in the water so they don't stick to the bottom. Knowing when it's done al dente requires a bit of experience, but you can always bite a little off the end of a noodle to test.
While that's going, you can make your sauce on another stove slot. There's a lot of variations here, but make sure not to add the actual sauce in until the very end, otherwise it takes a lot longer for the fresh ingredients to fully cook. (Tip: Add individual ingredients in order of how long they take to cook - generally, meats, then hard fibrous veggies, then soft veggies. May require some experimentation over time.) Prepackaged jars of pasta sauce work just fine, but a dash of herbs goes a long way, IMO.
When the noodles are done, drain the pot and move the contents into a bowl(s), then top with sauce when that's done.
They'd better be completely submerged. The usual suggestion is to use 1 litre of water for each 100 grams of pasta.
The number of minutes they write on the pack is usually about right.
Or, drain the pot, move the noodles into the pan with the sauce in it, stir, and move into a bowl.
It's entirely possible to cook pasta in very little water in a small pot. Since Procedural Knowledge is the context, I'll give my mother's recipe:
Use about 2 times the mass of the pasta in water. (Keep the lid on the pot as much as possible so as not to lose water.)
Generally, the resulting pasta is delicious_kpreid, and requires almost no draining (sauce goes right in the pot).
Addendum for spaghetti: It generally won't fit in the pot raw, so put it in and put the lid on top as best as you can, then when it is sufficiently softened, stuff it the rest of the way. While returning to boil, about once per minute open the pot and stir the strands as much as possible until they have formed a tangle rather than lying parallel.
I just break the strands into two before dropping them into the pot. I assumes there must be some reason not to do this because I don't know anyone else who does this, but I honestly can't tell the difference when I eat it.
I think the only reason not to do this is that it's "bad form", i.e. I don't think there is any actual downside. (I have stopped doing it because people make fun of it, but I don't think there's any actual reason not to do it.)
Sorry about the bad wording, I meant "once they're soft enough to be able to be stirred", which means they're mostly or completely in the water. You do want to put enough water in the pot to submerge all the noodles.