I'm a thirty something Texan originally from California with eclectic tastes. I love Vietnamese food as well as REAL Mexican food (not this Tex-Mex stuff). :) I love to cook and bake and I love anything from quick and easy to gourmet depending on my time available. Whatever makes my sweetheart smile. Ok, seriously, I love to cook fabulous feasts for dinner and am still trying my hand at many different things. I grew up baking every chance I got and feel like I've been away from baking for awhile but am now finding myself baking cakes and learning new techniques. Never really gave up on cookies, people would kill me if I did. Thanksgiving was always huge for tradition. We would always start with staling the bread the night before and be up early to make our homemade stuffing. We made everything from scratch and my mom and I always enjoyed the day together in the kitchen. My mom passed away a few years ago and so Thanksgiving has changed for me but I hope to continue this tradition with my children when I have them. I also have always loved our Christmas cookie tradition. Between cookies and candies, we would be baking and decorating for two days to make as much as we needed just to give it all away to our close friends, family, neighbors and coworkers. We'd have decorating parties where friends came over to help and we'd have twenty people having fun with us. I hope to pass this on to my children as well. Everything we ever baked was always from scratch, never out of a box and I have to say I love that. A little extra TLC in every bite. I think my greatest triumph started with I can't really think of a time where I truly made a recipe inedible. That has given me confidence to try more and more complicated techniques. As my confidence has grown, I continue to adapt things to how I think flavors blend so at this point, I'm starting to make my own recipes. My fiance loves my cooking so much and knows that he can tell me what he truly thinks and between learning his tastes and knowing mine, I'm making recipes that please us both. My cooking tragedy is that I can't cook alongside my mom anymore. As far as recipes that have needed to be trashed, maybe it's selective memory, but I can't think of any. Sometimes having to salvage something makes the recipe more interesting and fun. Luckily, I think everything I've ever "screwed up" has been salvageable.