I began cooking out of necessity. I am German and was travelling the western states for 6 month as a tourist when my pickup broke down on a guest ranch in Wyoming. The ranchers offered me to stay for free if I would cook for their guests. Well, I appreciated the offer but – “Gee”, I said, “I can’t cook.” The ranchers didn’t care and I ended up standing in the kitchen with a raw chicken in my hand while trying to call my mother in Germany and ask her what to do with it. In the following month I used a lot of imagination and benefited from the hours I spend as a kid in my mothers kitchen while she, a highly gifted cook, was preparing meals. Turned out I had a bit of her talent and got some edible meals on the table. This is 7 years ago, I’m still in Wyoming, a country I love, and this year the ranch hired me again for cooking. Lucky guests – with my meanwhile acquired experience and all the recipe ideas on allrecipes.com they are out for some good food on the ranch! Favorite recipes are food I like to eat - turns out to be a lot with onions ... or sugar ;-) Things my mother cooked in Germany: Onion cake in fall when the grapes for the wine were harvested. Meat fondue (? - don't even know how it is called in English) for Christmas Eve. Feeding guests and staff on a guest ranch and they actually liking my food - of course not telling them that my biggest cooking challenge before taking this job as a cook was boiling hard eggs. So far only the sometimes funny, sometimes disappointing feedbacks from guests from different nations. I cook a lot for Italian guests while our staff are Americans with a hearty country appetite. Serve Mashed Potatoes – the Italians won’t touch it, the Americans eat the last bite. Serve Spaghetti just with garlic and olive oil – the Italians while rave over it, the Americans will look confused for the meat. The other day I made Onion Rings. My kitchen help, an Italian girl that barely speaks English, looked at them with big eyes: “I like them!” I looked at her, sceptical: “I don’t think you know what this is – you don’t have this in Italy.” She nodded: “No, I know! Calamari!” I love onion rings and, to be honest, was making them mostly for myself since I did know that my Italian guests don’t eat what they don’t know and therefore wouldn’t touch the onion rings. Hey, the onion rings were a hit – everybody took plenty. Because they thought they were Calamari. :)