I love to cook and I am just now getting started in baking. I love trying to cook new things. I also like to photograph my cooking adventures and post them online to share with my friends & family. My Cooking & knitting blog is located at http://www.theivykitchen.blogspot.com If you love to cook and would like to interact and chat with other Allrecipes users, check out http://thequalitycook.phpbbnow.com/index.php We share recipes, cooking tips and lots of laughs. Appetizers like egg rolls, deviled eggs, empanadas. I go to a lot of pot luck events so I like to try new casseroles and such. I use my bread machine alot, I doubt I would be able to make good bread without it (although I almost exclusivley use it to make dough, I don't liek how it cooks the bread). I just recently disovered the slow cooker and made my first successful pot roast. My mom made a big lasagna for Christmas dinner every year, and now I like to do that too, while I incorperate some of her techniques, I have come up with my own recipe that I think works well. I also enjoy Asian cooking as a result of growing up with a friend that lived next door who was from a Cambodian family. I learned so much about cooking from watching her mom, who doesn't speak English! When we were teenagers, my friend and I always wanted to learn to make her mom's Cambodian egg rolls. Sometimes she would let us fry them, and ONCE she even let us roll them, but she would never teach us how to make the filling (it was her specialty). So we set out to invent our own. We came up with a recipe that I still use to this day, although they are nothing like her mom's! Earlier his year I made a batch of honey wheat dinner roll dough that I wanted to try making into a bread loaf. I put it in the bread pan, let it rise until I thought it was a good height, put it in the oven and when the timer went off, it had gotten so huge it flopped over the side of the pan (it was also still a gooey mess on the inside)! I have since tried cutting the dough in half and baking it in TWO loaf pans and it comes out just fine!