My idea of cooking as a student - a student who put tomatoes and lettuce, on the first day he arrived at university, in the freezer - was boiling things, mainly, but now my idea of cooking is: stocks and soups! Learn about stocks and soups and how you can boil a stock down, what you can add to it, and the bases for things like soups - veg and garlics and onions and what-have-you, and the world is your table, honestly. This all sounds a bit glib probably but it was a great way of getting to understand flavour a bit more when you have to build it up bit by bit from raw ingredients.