comfort foods, baked goods, casseroles. Every year at Christmas, my family makes homemade ice cream. Each year as more great-grandchildren enter the family, Grandma has to remind each one of them "Don't eat it too fast or you'll freeze your belly!" Also at every Christmas, Grandma makes her famous homemade noodles, one pot of beef noodles and one pot of milk noodles. And every year, we each try to figure out which we like best...its always a tie. No real triumphs per se. Everytime I'm successful in the kitchen is a triumph in my opinion. I haven't tried anything too difficult yet as I still consider myself somewhat of a beginner. The biggest thing for me is cooking to make my picky-ish boyfriend happy. If I try a new recipe that I'm not sure he'll like, and he does?? Success! Around the age of 12, my girlfriends and I decided to make cookies for the cop that lived in the neighborhood. He was a good friend of all of our families and was known to stop in and check up on us randomly in the summertime when he knew our parents were working and we were old enough to stay home alone. After getting permission from our parents, we slaved away over the cookie recipe, making sure to measure everything just so. We saw the officer pull into his house for lunch and we yelled across the street to let him know the cookies would still be warm when he finished eating and that he should stop over. And he did. We took the pan of cookies out of the oven, so excited, only to find that we missed a main ingredient. Likely flour as our pan of cookies had turned into one giant, flat, pancake-like cookie. Our police officer friend was very disappointed, as were we.