One Pot, One Knife: Cooking With Almost No Equipment

Not every kitchen has a kitchen's worth of equipment. Some are a single bench and two drawers. Some are shared with five other people and one clean saucepan. And some days the equipment is fine — it's the pile of washing up afterwards that decides whether you cook at all.

So this is a note about cooking small. One pot, one knife, one board. Not as a challenge or a minimalist exercise, but because fewer objects means fewer decisions, less cleaning, and a much shorter distance between hungry and fed.

The real equipment list

Most recipes assume a kitchen you may not have. Here is what genuinely covers most cooking:

• One deep saucepan or pot, roughly 3–4 litres. Deep enough to boil pasta, wide enough to fry an onion.
• One knife, sharp. A medium cook's knife does what a set of six does.
• One chopping board.
• One wooden spoon.
• A colander — or the lid held against the pot while you tip the water out, which works.

That's the whole list. Everything below is built on it.

What one pot can do that recipes don't mention

• Boil, then fry in the same pot. Cook the pasta, drain it, put the pot back on the heat and use it as the frying pan. One wash instead of two.
• Cook in stages rather than in separate pans. Onion first, then the harder vegetables, then the tin. Nothing is lost.
• Eat out of the pot on a low day. There is no rule against it.
• Boil the kettle instead of waiting for the pot to come up. Faster, and less standing around watching it.

Three meals that need nothing else

Tin pasta

Pasta on to boil. Drain it, return the pot to the heat with a splash of oil, tip in a tin of tomatoes or a tin of white beans, warm it through, stir the pasta back in. Salt, pepper, whatever is in the fridge door. Ten minutes, one pot.

Rice and egg

Leftover rice, or a microwave pouch, which counts. Heat oil in the pot, crack in two eggs and break them up, add the rice, then soy sauce and frozen peas straight from the freezer. Frozen vegetables need no knife at all.

Anything soup

Onion in oil, a tin of legumes, a stock cube, water to cover, and whatever vegetable is going soft in the crisper. Simmer until it looks like soup. Nothing here needs measuring or timing closely.

The washing up sets the limit

Worth saying plainly: if you can't face the cleaning, you won't start the cooking. That isn't laziness. It's accurate forecasting.

So count the washing up before you count the ingredients. A meal that dirties one pot and one board is a meal you can finish. A recipe with three pans and a blender may be lovely, and it may also never happen.

If the sink is already full, the honest options are a no-cook meal, a one-pot meal, or takeaway. All three are fine.

If you buy one more thing

When there is a bit of money and room for exactly one addition:

• Kitchen scissors (around $10–15). They cut herbs, bacon, chicken and packets, all without a board.
• A deep frying pan with a lid, if your pot is small. It does both jobs.
• A sharp knife, if yours is blunt. A blunt knife makes chopping feel far harder than it is, and that alone stops meals.

Sharpening the knife you already own is cheaper than all of these, and often makes the biggest difference.

Share houses and borrowed kitchens

If the kitchen isn't only yours, keep a small kit somewhere you control — a knife, a board, a pot, a tea towel. Not because other people are the problem, but because a whole decision disappears when you never have to check what's clean or free first.

Wash as you go where you can manage it. In a shared kitchen the pile isn't only yours to feel bad about.

The short version

Cooking with almost no equipment isn't a lesser version of cooking. Most days it's the version that actually gets eaten. One pot, one knife, and a meal you can clean up in four minutes beats a better recipe you never start.

Less deciding, more eating.

Related reading: One Tray, No Watching: Oven Dinners That Don't Need Supervision.