I am the wife of an AMAZING man, the mother of FANTASTIC children, and the servant of my AWESOME Savior, Jesus! I love to experiment and explore when I am cooking. I am often guilty of not writing anything down, so my husband has a hard time asking me to repeat a recipe. My cooking is almost always motivated exclusively by the anticipation of smiles on my family members' faces. My favorite things to cook are the things that win the biggest smiles from my family. They love Italian food, Mexican food, American food, random-made-it-up-out-of-whatever-was-in-the-cupboard food, etc. I really like to cook a variety. I would get bored easily with just one style of cooking. Whoever cooks the meal is immune from doing dishes! I make a mean thanksgiving dinner, and I am really good at soups ...but I think what I am extremely good at is being able to make a yummy meal out of the end-of-the-month random ingredients in the cupboards. We never have to order pizza just because we are out of ingredients for our normal repertoire of meals. Also, when I need to, I can make extremely inexpensive meals that still taste good. I love figuring out how many ways I can feed my family of five a healthy delicious meal that costs less than three dollars total. Not all my meals are cost efficient, but I'm more satisfied when I know I have saved my family money. Those are the things that make me feel triumphant. :) One time I invited friends of ours over for dinner and the mother of the family was pregnant. I told her that I am not good at timing things right (understatement of the year), especially when company comes. So I let her know that they could come between 5:00 and 5:30, and that whenever they arrived I would inevitably have some things to finish up before we ate, so we could just chat for a while. Well... poor thing. I was REALLY bad at timing that night, and I didn't feed the poor girl until like 7:30. Can you imagine eating two hours late when you are pregnant? My family didn't care... we eat dinner strictly between 4 and 10 pm. :) But I did feel sorry for my poor pregnant hungry friend.