I believe that food need not be expensive to be tasty. Cooking, for me, is about nourishment, foremost, but also about improvisation and imagination. I love making soup. There is so much room for creativity, and it's much harder to mess up with soup than with baked goods, for instance, where quantity and proportion are so important. Nevertheless, I do love to bake--especially cake! I am not a proper vegetarian in philosophy, but in practice I eat very little meat, and I am quite interested in vegetarian and vegan cooking. My latest interest is finding interesting substitutes for meat and eggs in traditional recipes. Christmas cookies. Basler Brunsli (to reflect our Swiss heritage) are my favorite! Bittersweet chocolate and almond dough are cut into shapes and coated with sugar before being baked in a slow oven to dry out like meringue. I've made a few good cakes that my friends enjoyed a great deal, including a moist and yummy chocolate cake for my boyfriend's birthday, and a Victoria sponge served with real whipped cream and fresh raspberries. I once made a passable Pavlova...but only once so far (a Pav is a hard thing to get right!). Oh, and my curried butternut squash soup is quite popular. Once I tried to make chocolate-chip pumpkin bread, but I got distracted while making the batter and completely forgot to add the baking soda. What resulted was a very rubbery sort of chocolate-chip pumpkin pudding...