About once a week, although when I buy flap steak from Costco instead of ribeye from Fresh Market I’ll cut it myself into four to five steaks and have two steak meals, usually one where we cook bigger portions and have panroasted brussels, asparagus, zucchini or yellow squash on the side and use the smaller steaks cut from the edges as steaks I cook and then cut for a salad with a homemade dressing of some sort.
My wife and I usually split up the cooking fairly equally. I usually cook the main courses that require more time over the stove while she preps and cooks the sides which are usually oven roasted veggies in a pan or some quick sauteed greens and/or veggies. And she usually makes the green smoothies we typically have for lunch unless it’s leftovers or we meet up for a lunch out.
But I usually end up cooking about five dinners a week at home, most of which are simple meat and veg dinners. So steaks either pan seared or gas grilled outside, pork chops or pork “sirloin” usually pan seared sometimes with a marinade but usually with an interesting dry rub combo (lots of great things for pork like Thai lime cilantro, tandoori spicing, Korean bbq, Japanese shichimi togarashi, sriracha garlic butter, etc...) and usually a shrimp, shelled crawfish or fish pan sautéed dish. I vary up the seasonings a lot so it doesn’t get old at all and we also have meals where I’ll make a homemade salad like a Caesar with chicken and Jarred (not canned) anchovy filets or a panfried oyster and red wine salad (an old Southern Living recipe I found about a decade ago that’s one of my favorite salads of all time). And we’ll also usually make a soup or stew once every other week that we freeze for leftovers. But of those five days I cook, I’d say it’s almost always one day of steak and one day of a pork chop or pork sirloin. The rest varies a fair amount.
And yes, I usually take one day out of the week to do a complex recipe of some sort. Recently I’ve been alternating between making authentic but complex Ethiopian, Greek and Mexican dishes.
The things I do NOT do at home is 1) deep fry as there’s too much out we get deep fried, 2) cook starches on a usual basis as again we get pastas, potatoes and breads on a usual basis when out and 3) cook a lot of chicken because again there’s way too much of it available at different restaurants.
