I grew up on a small island in Alaska. My love for cooking began in high school as I was striving to eat a healtheir diet. I fell in love and have been cooking for my loved ones since then. My eyes were opened to an entirely new culinary world when I moved out of my small town to Seattle for college. Now, I live in Birmingham and am experiencing yet another new culinary world. I am working on my degree in Elementary Education, but am seriously considering going to culinary school. I love taking new recipes of all sorts and challenging myself to create the healthiest dish I can with that recipe without robbing it of flavor. Unfortunately, my desire of eating healthy conflicts with my love of baking. Right now, my favorite thing to do is make favorite baked goods with whole wheat such as cinnamon rolls, muffins, waffles, pancakes, and breads. My favorite family cooking tradition is making corn fritters on Christmas morning. We only have corn fritters on this one day every year! After opening presents, we gather in the kitchen to help make a triple batch of these scrumptious fritters. Then we gather around the table to enjoy dunking them in syrup and eating way more than we should! I recently held a bake sale all by myself to raise money to go on a mission trip to the Dominican Republic. I baked from sun up to sun down for a week straight. It paid off because I made almost $300 dollars profit for the mission trip. My greatest triumphs were my carrot cake, apple pie, and german chocolate cake (all recipes I got from this website). Another triumph was cooking Christmas dinner for me and my husband 6 days after we got married. I made cornish game-hens with lemon and rosemary, mashed sweet potatoes, wild rice, and salad. It wasn't anything super special, but it was the first Christmas dinner I prepared all by myself. Ohhh....I don't even know where to start. Perhaps with the many batches of dough I made that never rose. Oh perhaps all those times I put too much water in the rice. Once, I was a partner in crime when my mom and I almost set our house on fire. We were grilling salmon on cedar planks and one caught fire. We thought we put it out, but we didn't know that some coals fell beneath our deck and caught a couple support beams on fire. We put it out with our hose and all was fine. Believe it or not, the salmon tasted great!