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I am so glad to see the majority is more than 5 nights a week. I don't know what I'd do if I didn't get to cook. Sure, some nights it's nice to just have someone do the hard work, but most days, especially week nights, I need that time to unwind from work and rejuvinate myself.

I wish I could cook all day...

8!

Almost every night, though that's only if you include baking -- some nights I'll cook a meal and baked goods for work the next day, some nights just the meal, some nights just the batch of cookies...

Admittedly, some nights I'll come home and just lay in bed, asking the significant other to cook. When he asks why he gets significant damage done to his person ;)

It depends on what I'm cooking... which basically means how lazy do I feel for that week? If I'm feeling very lazy I'll cook one big batch of whatever, set aside several meals in plastic containers, and freeze them for lunches & dinners. I generally do this anyway to make lunch for work, but if I'm feeling especially lazy I'll make more for dinners. Or if I'm really lazy I'll buy a huge amount of chicken, rub it with pepper & garlic, grill it on the foreman grill, and dice it all - to use in salad, pasta, etc. (usually salad) For salads I'll make a batch of corn, black beans, and diced red onion and put it in a plastic container. At that point, sure I'll need to toss some greens in a bucket for salad but I wouldn't consider that to be much in the way of cooking.

Otherwise if I'm not feeling too lazy I'll cook 4-5 times a week. I tried to put that into the survey but it doesn't want to let me answer.

We always go out to eat on Thursday and Saturday -- to try new restaurants and visit old favorites. That means we technically eat at home 5 nights a week, but I definitely don't cook that much. We often will have some leftovers supplemented by some fruit or salad. Or sometimes we have what I call a "pantry dinner" -- bread, cheese, olives, wine, etc. I don't think that really counts, so I think it works out to cooking 3-4 times a week.

We either cook or eat leftovers most nights. We have one night that takes us away from the house (picking up our CSA share about 40 min away from home) and we hardly ever get a home-cooked meal that night ... and we generally eat out once a week. But overall, it's healthier and more cost-effective to prepare our own meals.

I'm definitely seeing slack because of the summer. Even though we all have full-time jobs and have been out of college for years, my friends and I are in total summer mode and I'm barely home! I have four gorgeous tomatoes from the last two weeks of my CSA, and I need to use them up, asap! But I haven't been cooking much at all.

Since I usually cook for just myself, there are times I cook a big batch of something and live off of it for days, so I end up cooking only a few days a week. For the most part, though, I manage recipes for one and cook up something fresh for myself at least for dinner, packing up leftovers for lunches.

I cook virtually every day, which shocks and appalls some of my peers. I find that chopping and prepping (the boyfriend tends to do the actual cooking) clears my head from the day at work and I also get to enjoy the evening public radio show too.

I'm cooking a lot these days since I'm cutting back on expenses, so less Amy's frozen dinners, less meals out, always bring lunch to work. I'm making piles of brown rice and other grains so they're available right away when I need them. Cooked some dried beans last night. Since it's the end of the budget month, I'm cleaning out and using up every last bit of food I can find in the kitchen, so I don't go over my budget! It's actually very empowering. And, I ate way healthy.

We eat at home almost every night, but I don't know if we could really claim to COOK every night. It depends on whether you count things like leftovers, salad, and haphazard assemblages of whatever we have on hand (too-small portions of leftovers, cheese, crackers, raw veggies, etc.) But we try!

Breakfast, weekend lunches, and dinner, almost every day. It's my second job. We can't quite afford our rent these days (it more than doubled a year ago), and when it came to what gives, eating out and takeout were the obvious money. Much as I love to cook, I do sometimes wish it were optional! But the fact is that by far the cheapest way to eat is to buy whole foods, dried beans, grains, and basic dairy and chop/season/cook it yourself. So our wallets aren't fat but we're ridiculously healthy and my knife skills are really coming along. (Husband does not cook. Husband cannot reliably boil water. Toddler is learning to cook. Her specialty is the whisk. And menu planning. She's surprisingly good at menu planning.)

5 or 6. usually one night out to dinner and one night of "cooking" (leftovers, leftovers reinvented, or something very simple).

i find that planning the menu for the week (and, of course, shopping accordingly) makes me so much more likely to want to cook dinner after work. the weeks the boy and i are bad about menu planning are the weeks we blow the whole month's going-out budget in 5 days.

I answered 2 only because I don't consider heating or re-jiggering leftovers to be cooking, and I cook 2 meals a week, expecting to eat at least 8 or 9 times (lunches & dinners) from those two meals. The remainder of the time, I'm usually at a friend's for dinner, or perhaps takeout for lunch.

I cook at least once a day most weeks. I cook dinner at least 4 nights a week. Weekends are pretty much free-for-alls, but that doesn't mean I'm not preparing something!

I often cook one thing and eat it for a good chunk of the rest of the week. I eat out at least once a week (bad of me, I know, but it's fun to go out with friends), too. The other couple of nights are often eggs on toast or a quick pasta but that's still cooking, right?

I'm still job hunting after graduating in May, and the boyfriend is doing an internship, so we have not eaten out since June 1st, when we stopped relying on parental support (gulp!). That includes lunches, which are so convenient and so expensive here in DC (even a mediocre sandwich can be $7, which is ridiculous!). Since I have all this time on my hands, cooking at home hasn't really been a big deal, but I'm definitely missing sushi, Chinese food and commercial pizza (we make homemade pizza, but it's just a different food!). Since we're on a budget, we've been eating very small amounts of meat (what would normally be considered a one person steak or chicken piece feeds two of us), and filling up on fresh veggies from the farmer's market and sides of rice or whole wheat cous-cous. We've also gotten very creative with different pasta dishes!

I have to cook more in order to keep up with the bounty of CSA - I can't stand letting any of these amazing vegetables to go waste.

But the heat can be enough of an issue that some nights my cooking could only stretch as far as making a sandwich. Or a smoothie, but I just cannot bring myself to fire up the oven.

Depends on what you mean--while we go out maybe 2-3 times a month in my household, every week I only really cook an average of 4 times. The other nights, my husband cooks (sort of--he's one of those people with 3 recipes in their repertoire) or I fake it by putting together some leftovers or throwing together a dinner that I can't in good conscience call cooking.

I'm also one of those people who cooks only 4 or 5 times a week but just has leftovers on the nights I don't cook. I never eat out though occasionally we have a pizza delivered when I'm too tired to cook. I don't count certain types of food preparation as "cooking" even if I do make the meal myself. The problem witch cooking isn't the cooking part. It's the cleaning up. I don't have a dishwasher and have to wash everything by hand.

It's no surprise that the demographic which reads a kitchen-based web site would cook more than most folks though.