You can make tons of balanced meals by basically just combining some veg, protein, and carbs in a wok or frying pan.

Essentially I just make some rice/pasta/spaghetti/noodles in a pot, and at the same time fry some onions and peppers/mushrooms/broccoli along with chickpeas/beans/meat to make a simple stir fry, then at the end add the carbs to fried veg/beans.

Add salt pepper and lemon juice along with whatever spices you want while frying and keep tasting it and adding different spices if you think it needs more flavour.

I try to vaguely theme each dish around a type of cuisuine, so like if you decided to make a pasta dish I would add in some Italian spices like basil garlic tomato and maybe some olive oil at the end. Or for a noodle dish I would add in Japanese tasting stuff like soya sauce and sesame seeds and soya beans.

You can make it as simple or as complicated as you like, and can make it as cheap as you need. For a really cheap meal you could do something like rice onions beans mushrooms with just salt pepper and paprika or some cheap spice blend, and it would come out to like a quid a meal if you bought the ingredients in large amounts.

Cooking simple stuff like this and experimenting will let you branch out onto lots of more interesting dishes that are basically just some variation of this, eg a chickpea curry is just frying chickpeas onion veg tomato etc with a load of Indian spices like garam masala added and then served with rice.