I've been cooking ever since I can remember. My mom is a great cook and liked to make everything from scratch. I've helped her since I was just a little kid. She even has a picture of me kneading bread at about 4 yrs old. Cooking is about the only creative thing I do, so it is an important outlet for me. In the last few years I've been trying to really eat healthy and learning to cook healthy has been a real challenge sometimes. I mainly like to cook not bake. I love to try all different recipes, especially anything unusual. In the last year I've been working on making stir-fry type dishes. My family's cooking was mostly hearty comfort foods, and especially many Hungarian dishes as my grandfather was Hungarian. My mom commonly made quite a few Hungarian pastries. There was always lots of really great food at our family functions. Now I mainly save those recipes for special occasions. One year at x-mas my sister and I were planning on making flan for something different for the family dinner. We have both made it previously but for some reason that evening we could not make the caramel sauce that you make with it. I don't know what was going on but the sugar would go from just starting to melt to hard crystal - like rock candy, in a few seconds. We tried 2 or 3 times and it happened every time, then we gave up. We've both made it since - separately - and have been fine but apparently we can't do it together!