A couple of pieces of advice:

Treat recipes as lists of techniques

When you look at recipes, don’t just look at them as ‘instructions to make [insert meal here]’. Look at them as ways to prepare and cook [insert ingredient here] as well. Here is an ‘easy’ recipe for Ragù alla Bolognese (it’s a pretty crap Bolognese recipe to be honest, but it works for this example because it’s so simple). And, of course, it tells you how to make a very basic Bolognese sauce.

But it also tells you how to make a flavor base for a sauce using onion and garlic. It tells you how to get more flavour from the ground beef by browning it. It tells you how to enrich your sauce with red wine, and that you should let that simmer until the alcohol has mostly evaporated. It gives you some things you can add to a sauce to get more flavor: Worcestershire sauce, bay leaves, and thyme. It tells you that you can get a richer, deeper flavor by simmering for a long time. Each of these techniques is transferable to other dishes.

You could, very easily, use the same recipe, but drop the wine, the Worcestershire, and the herbs. Add some cumin, paprika, chilli powder at the start, and beans towards the end, and garnish with chopped coriander/cilantro to make a simple chilli.

Or, ditch the wine, swap the Worcestershire and herbs for some ginger, cumin and garam masala, add peas at the end, and make a simple Keema Mutar curry.

The core of all three of those dishes (from three different continents!) is: Soften onion and garlic. Brown mince. Add tomatoes and cuisine-appropriate spices/herbs. Simmer. Add quick cooking veggies near the end.

If you treat recipes like this you learn techniques not just meals. Once you have a few techniques learned you’ll have the confidence to improvise because you know the fundamentals will work.

Mise en Place

When you’re feeling brave and trying something complex, or something you’ve never cooked before, try mise en place. This is the cheffy name for ‘getting everything ready’. One of the most stressful bits of cooking a new recipe is when you get to, eg: “Step 8. Add the fish sauce”, and you need to scroll back up the screen (if you’re using a website or an app) to look at how much fish sauce you need, then find the fish sauce, then find a measuring spoon, then scrolling back up again because you’ve already forgotten how much fish sauce you need, etc.

Instead, you work your way through the list of ingredients and measure everything out before you start any cooking. If the recipe lists chopped onion, get that onion, chop it, stick it in a bowl ready for when it’s needed. If multiple veggies are added at the same time, prepare them and put them in the same bowl. Where I live, takeaway Chinese food comes in little plastic tubs. I have a dozen or so of these that I use for this purpose. They’re free, stackable, washable, and a good size for most ingredients.

This has three huge benefits. Firstly, you double check you have everything you need before you start cooking (and have time to google ‘alternative to tomatillos’ or whatever, or get someone to run to the store to pick up what you need). Secondly it’s a lot easier to do all your veggie prep in one go, then meat prep in one go, and so on. And thirdly, it makes following the recipe so much more relaxed and easy because everything is ready to go and - if you’ve checked the recipe in advance as well - in the right order for when you need them. There’s not much more stress in the kitchen than suddenly realising that you need to add an ingredient now that will take five or ten minutes to clean and prepare! Doing your mise en place makes the cooking feel almost like cheating it becomes so easy.

Bonus advice

Keep your chopping boards segregated! I have one that I only use, and always use, for raw meat. I never use any of the others for raw meat, only veggies, cooked meats, etc. You do not want to prepare a salad on the same chopping board you used to cut up your raw chicken.