My advice (and I'm a home cook) is to find four or five simple dishes you like and learn how to make them. For instance, if you can learn to sauté thin slices of chicken breast, you can make many dishes using them as a base (chicken piccata, chicken marsala, chicken parmesan....). Learn to braise and you can make great meals using cheap cuts of meat and, it'll go a long way. For instance, if you make a pot roast out of beef chuck, you can shred the leftovers and add some BBQ sauce; make vegetable beef soup; sauce it up with taco seasonings.... and also
www.jamaicathings.com is a good source of ingredients.
Many good home cooks have a repertoire of, say, 10 dishes they make in rotation with a few new ones thrown in now and then for variety. That makes it easy to keep basic stuff available in your pantry to have on hand.
Keep it simple and you'll feel comfortable branching out to try new things.