Claim one night a week and cook for the whole house

Pick a night and say it out loud at the weekend, while everyone's in the kitchen anyway. "I'm cooking Thursday." Then put it on whatever your family uses for a calendar, so you can't quietly let it slide on Wednesday afternoon when you remember you have homework.

That's the start. Not a cookbook, not a pile of equipment. One night, one meal, one time you've told people to be at the table. Say 6:45.

The first one will go badly in some small way. Mine did. The chicken was done and beautiful and the potatoes were still hard in the middle, so five people sat around a table at ten past eight eating in a slightly strained silence while I stood at the oven feeling like the worst cook in Britain. Nobody died. We ate at 6:45 the following week.

Cooking for five people isn't cooking for one, five times

You can already make something for yourself. Beans on toast, eggs, pasta with whatever's in the cupboard. The jump isn't about harder recipes. It's that a family meal has three or four things that all have to be ready at the same moment, and none of them take the same amount of time.

That's a timing problem, not a cooking problem. And timing is the thing you can actually plan.

Work backwards from the clock

Get a piece of paper. Write your eating time at the bottom. Then work up the page.

Say you're doing chicken thighs, roast potatoes and green beans. Potatoes cut into chunks take around 40 to 45 minutes at 200°C. Bone-in thighs take 35 to 40. Beans take six minutes in boiling water and about two minutes to go from perfect to sad.

So your page reads: 5:55 potatoes in. 6:05 chicken in. 6:35 beans on. 6:45 eat.

Stick that on the fridge where you can see it with flour on your hands. The paper does the remembering, which frees your head up for the actual cooking. Professional kitchens run on exactly this, just with more paper and more shouting.

One more thing to write down: read the recipe all the way through the night before. Twice. That's where you find out it wants the meat marinated for four hours, or the oven at a temperature you can't hit while something else is in there.

Cook the same dinner three weeks running

This is the advice most people ignore and it's the one that works.

Pick one meal. Cook it Thursday. Cook it again next Thursday. And again the Thursday after that. By the third time you're not reading the recipe, you're watching the food, which is the entire difference between someone who follows instructions and someone who can cook.

Your family won't mind. Families eat the same six dinners on rotation anyway, they just don't admit it.

Then add a fourth Thursday with something new, and now you've got two. Two becomes four by the summer. Four meals you can cook without panic is more than plenty of adults have.

Go for things that are hard to ruin. A tray of sausages and vegetables roasted together. A chilli that sits in one pot and improves the longer it sits. A big pan of pasta sauce. Avoid anything where the whole dish depends on one delicate moment until you've got a few wins behind you.

The things that will actually hurt you

A sharp knife is safer than a blunt one, because a blunt one slides off the onion instead of going into it. Curl the fingertips of your other hand under, knuckles forward, and let the side of the blade rest against your knuckles. Cut a flat side onto anything round so it can't roll.

Oil fires don't get water. Ever. If a pan catches, turn off the heat and put a lid or a baking tray over it and leave it alone. Water on burning oil throws a fireball at your face. Learn that now, in a calm moment, so it's already in your head if it ever happens.

Oven gloves have to be dry. A damp tea towel conducts heat straight through to your hand in about a second, and that burn is worse than the one you'd get from touching the shelf.

Raw chicken gets its own board and its own bit of counter. Wash your hands after, properly, with soap. Don't rinse chicken under the tap, because all that does is spray bacteria around your sink. Cook it until there's no pink at the thickest part and the juices run clear. A cheap meat thermometer takes the guessing out of it completely and is one of the best things you can ask for at Christmas.

Burns go under cool running water for twenty minutes. Not butter, not ice. If a cut is deep or won't stop bleeding, get a parent, and get it looked at properly.

Someone won't like it

Probably a younger sibling, and probably loudly.

You don't cook to please everybody, because that's impossible and it ends with you making four different dinners. You cook one good meal and put it on the table. People can eat more of the bits they like. That's the arrangement adults have with each other and it's fine.

What's fair is asking, once, before you plan: is anyone allergic to anything, and is there anything nobody will touch. Allergies matter enormously and you take them seriously. "I don't like mushrooms" you can work around or ignore.

If a parent is managing a real dietary restriction, ask them what's safe rather than guessing from the internet.

The clean-up is part of the job

Wash up as you go. Fill the sink while the oven preheats, and anything you're finished with goes in. Boards, the knife, the mixing bowl, the empty tin.

Do this and the kitchen at 6:45 contains four dirty pans and nothing else. Skip it and you'll be standing in a wreck at half past seven, which is the exact reason people give up on cooking after two attempts.

Also, ask about money before you shop. Find out what the food budget looks like on a normal week and stay inside it. Cooking for your family is a gift you're giving, and part of the gift isn't quietly spending forty pounds of somebody else's money on ingredients you'll use once.

Then call everyone to the table

Put phones somewhere else. Lay it properly, even if properly just means forks and a jug of water. If your family says grace, say it, and let it be you who says it that night.

You'll notice something odd the first time it goes right. Your mom or your dad will sit down while you're still at the hob, and they won't get up again, and you'll realize they haven't done that in a while.

That's the part that isn't about food.