How to create a ToC entry in epub for chapter without headline?

This has come up many times for me. How to create a ToC entry for a chapter or section that doesn't have a headline to use for the toc? 

Also related to this, how do you designate the point at which you want the book to open? Usuall this is the first item in the ToC, I think. But what if the page you'd like to see first doesn't have an ToC entry? 

Is there a way to have a ToC entry created for a page where those words don't show up on the page? 

In one book with a complex chapter opener that required me to make the header into an image, I made invisible tags for the chapter noumbers, this worked great but were rejected in Kindle, and the only solution I could do was to create teeny tiny white words at the top margin. These only showed up when the book was in night mode, but worked. Is there another way?