I cook HEAPS of different types of food.
We don’t like to get bored in this house.
I guess it depends on how often you mean, because I don’t often cook the same thing within two weeks of each other – except chicken rissotto because my partner loves it and i don’t have to think about it.

my salads are always unique, depending on my mood and on what i have in the fridge at any given moment. usually i will try and team them with a different meat every day and we try and eat vego once a week at least.

my “specialty” dishes are:
gnocchi from scratch, with napoli or puttanesca sauce.
eggplant parmagiana
chicken rissotto
steak, mushroom and bacon pie
shepherd’s pie
chilli con carne with potato skins
beef rib casserole
lamb shanks with lentils
salmon fillets with salad or veg
marinated lamb loin chops, greek style
beef cobbler
tuscan bean soup
marinated mushroom soup

salmon martini gravlax, apple crumble, chocolate mud cake on special occasions.

Well… I thought I cooked a lot of different dishes. And I guess I can cook many, many different things. But, as a postgrad student, my food budget has left me seriously bored of the things I can afford to cook – keeping in mind the fact that I also try to stray on the healthier side of life.

I’ve made it my resolution for the new year to learn one new dish every week, and to implement them into my weekly meals (i.e. not just a once off, but something I cook a couple of times a year at least).

My weeknight meals do tend to be variations on a theme. Pasta with seasonal veggies and tomato or fetta, or curry with seasonal veggies and lentils/beans. I have to be careful to put in other things for variety or it gets a bit boring. My mum is more organised and has a weekly menu. When you want an idea you can flick back a few months for something you haven’t had in a while.

As a regular reader of this blog I really appreciate the above survey.. Really nice survey!!!!!!!!!! Cooking is really depends on the mood also. Nice post. All would like to read such posts. :)

My cooking depends on what I find at the markets, and later on what needs to be used up in the fridge. I also eat mostly vegan, although I have no problem with a few animal products here and there. Over the last couple of weeks, some of the things I remember making are:

Pasta with roast capsicum, eggplant and goat cheese
Beetroot, carrot and cashew sald with tahini sauce
Vegetarian moussaka
Home-made falafel served with 3 or 4 different salads, and home-made baba ganoush and hoummus
Chicken with lemon and olives
Thyme and turmeric fish curry
Stewed lentils and eggplant with pomegranate sauce
Pumkin and leek tart
Home-made seeded bread
Home-made red lentil and 5 vege soup
Watercress and beef stir-fry
Home-made cabbage and sweet potato wontons in broth
Roast vegetable and chickpea salad
Tofu in orange and ginger sauce with coconut rice
Lemony quinoa with wilted spinach, beetroot leaves, and pumpkin
My mum’s bean and vegetable soup
Caramelised onion and paprika chicken livers (my family’s hungarian recipe)
Chickpea and spinach curry with home-made naan bread

I regularly soak and cook beans and lentils and freeze them for later use, so none of these meals took more than half an hour.

:: homegrown salad with tuna and local goat feta , herbs and a balsamic glaze .
:: biodynamic beef burgers on Brezel rolls with homemade tomato relish, homegrown salad and dijon (looking forward to my dill pickles being ready)
:: homemade tortilla with yoghurt-jalapeno guacamole, salad and organic grated cheese
:: locally made spinach ravioli with simple organic tomato sauce
:: herby stuffed mushrooms with salad.
:: homemade pizza with roasted pumpkin, local olives and australian feta
:: local lamb chops / vege burger with homemade mint sauce and potato caper salad

I know we didnt have any of these last week so must be more than 9 dishes we do! cury didnt feature this week – the HEAT here in SA- neither did risotto, stuffed potatoes, pad thai, soup, homeade pide and felafel, … this post got me thinking AND responding for the first time

Since blogging I have the opposite problem – I need to make an effort to revisit dishes because I am always trying something new – I have some that I love to go back to but I do a lot of variations depending on what is in the house – and I go through phases – we are having more pasta and salad lately because of the heat but a lot of different ones.

However, now that we have a baby in the house all this could change – will be interested to see – although already she is eating quite a variety of foods even if she is not always wrapt about it

I checked the “dinner” tag on my blog and came up with about 25 entries—mostly of things that I make at least somewhat regularly. But I’m often trying to keep myself from falling into a rut, which is why I regularly set myself the “Cookbook Challenge” (explanation here: http://therovinglemon.blogspot.com/2008/12/cookbook-challenge.html) to try to expand my repertoire. I’m thinking about doing another one in December….

At the risk of sounding like a wanker (can I say that here?), we never eat the same meal twice, when I’m cooking. I have Johanna’s problem of never re-visiting things in the same way, even though I know I should!

But my partner, he has his ‘set’ meals and these, when he’s cooking, never vary: 2 veg pasta dishes; A bolognese sauce that gets trotted out, most often, when I’m away; dahl; spanikopita; a chickpea and broad bean salad with haloumi on the side; a cracking souffle and a very good omelette. Partly I think this is because he cooks when his boys are here, and they like a bit of ritual. But then they also love it when I cook them something completely new. They’re interesting almost-adults, now.

I’ll use the same technique many times over (especially braising vegetables) but the ingredients are ever-changing. Interesting to see what other people do. Great topic.

Thanks all for your comments – I do love reading about what you cook and how you approach dinners.

I’d say we rarely eat the same thing twice, because like others have said, I find it almost impossible to make the same dish in the same way. Even when I’ve tried out and tested a recipe and written it down, it never remains the same. Often this is driven by wanting a different flavour or taste, but it’s also just as likely to be driven by what’s in the house. So I’ll go heavy on the herbs, because I want to use them up; or add preserved lemons, because we don’t have any fresh; or use different veg, because it’s what we have.

The only exception is Friday night – which 99.99999% of the time is pasta, cooked by Richard. We have spaghetti with a tomato sauce that has lots of dried oregano, dried chillies and capers, with mozzarella. While it’s the same meal every week I really look forward to pasta night.

what wonderful-sounding menus. and here i was worrying that cooking was falling out of fashion. i have four daughters (23, 20, 15, 13) and three of them cook once a week (well, they are supposed to). they have been brought up with a really wide variety of foods and experiences, so they are now becoming quite competent as cooks, and always make their meals tasty and (mostly) well-balanced. i was surprised to read that 81% of respondents cook more than one meal a night to cater for fussy children! beware or they will become fussy adults. great post, by the way.

I’m fascinated that the researchers have called “Indian curries” a dish, as if all Indian curries are the same. I mean, Indian people eat curries every day but they don’t eat the same thing every day. We eat curries once or twice a week, sometimes more than one curry in a night if I’ve had a good cooking day, they freeze well, they reheat well for lunches, and many of my favourites are ones I can make in stages through the day not all in one go at the end of the day.

Hello Kate and Kate, thank you for commenting. There is a wonderful list of meals in the comments isn’t there.

And t’other Kate, the list of most popular meals is pretty general isn’t it. Same is true for “pasta dishes” which can come in many, many shapes and sizes. I think these are just a round-up of the groupings/style of recipes they found people cooked in their survey. I don’t think they’re the same as the average nine meals the researchers talk about.

I just asked my husband and he says I seldom make the same thing twice in a whole month unless he asks me specifically and even then it’s a struggle… Things got even more varied now that I have started cooking with the seasons…

and to think I came from a country where people eat the same thing every day…

It’s as though the published results of the survey are designed to induce guilt in parents. As others have indicated some of the items on the list are pretty broad and are not really playing fair.

Don’t feel guilty about having a bunch of staples up your sleeve, just care more about the ingredients. It’s so easy to get the wrong message after reading a wealth of great food blogs (like this one!) that one person or family should turn out something brilliant or orginal as a matter of course.

I have a major problem with repeating meals for my husband and I. If I’ve tried a recipe, even if it tasted great and was easy to prepare, I rarely have any appetite to prepare that dish again. Seriously, any dish that I’ve made in the past looks absolutely unappetizing and boring to me. My mind goes: Been there; done that. I’ve been doing this for several years now, never repeating a recipe. But it’s starting to become a problem because there are only so many food products in the world, only so many seasonings, only so many methods of cooking and combining the items, and only so many recipes on the internet. But on the bright side, at least I have enough money to actually buy food – so why am I complaining?

That is a problem Rita! Maybe you can start doing variations on some of the dishes you’ve cooked. No matter what the recipe or dish, there are always several ways to cook it, so why not look for somebody else’s version of something you’ve already cooked. Would that be different enough?

Otherwise just try cooking something you’ve enjoyed again. While you might think “been there, done that” beforehand, you might just be surprised about how much you enjoy it. We do forget how dishes taste and exactly how good some meals can be. So just push through your mindset, try repeating something and see how you feel?

Good luck!