Let me share one of my own recipes.

Rice-lentil porridge

1. Get the papery stuff off an onion, chop off the non-root end and then cut a manhattan grid about 1 inch deep into the onion's circular face, set aside.
2. Get a a spoonful of oil (eyeball of course, no spoon needed) into the saucepan and wait a minute. Then get the stalks off 3-4 green chillies and carefully slice them lengthwise in half nearly all the way and dump 'em into the oil.
3. Pick up your onion and cut a round slice off a one inch disc over the pan, it should fall in neatly diced thanks to your grid. Stir with the knife a bit or just wiggle the pan around. Throw in some corriander and cumin powder and if you like (I am allowing store-bought pre-ground spices, but if necessary, you can actually use the handle of the knife as a pestle and the saucepan as a mortar). Add a small pinch of salt to sweat the onions a bit.
4. Throw a 1 handful of rice and 1 handful of lentils into the pot. Mix to get the oil coated over the rice and lentils. Add twice as much water by volume and get it to a boil.
5. Peel a carrot over with the knife if you can. Otherwise just wash it thoroughly and cut the ends off. Then slice it carefully lengthwise twice from the thin end nearly all the way to to the thick end so you have a cross like cut (go slow and cut away from body, you can easily have the knife jerk suddenly and cut you). Position over saucepan and slice 1/2" pieces down the carrot, so quadrant-shaped pieces fall in.
6. Do the same grid-and-slice-over-pan technique with a potato.
7. Add a pinch of turmeric, stir.
8. Add some more salt, turn down the heat to a simmer, and let the whole thing cook until done.
9. You can chop and add nearly any vegetable without a cutting board, but if you MUST have one, use the underside of the saucepan as a chopping surface. You can add any vegetable to this porridge, but just add it in reverse order of cooking time, and chop things roughly the same size. Most vegetables taste better if you fry 'em in the oil before you add the water, but some quick-cooking veggies will overcook if you do that, so the tradeoff is that you must put 'em in later and give up the fried taste.

Note, in knife-and-saucepan cooking, you'll be using any flat surface as storage, and any source of clean running water, like a stream, to clean stuff. If you happen to store your stuff on (say) a flat rock while camping, make sure you use some water to get all the dirt off as much as you can. You can get residual dirt off by washing in the running water before the final dump-in. This also means you need to boil the stuff as a hygiene measure.