Born and raised in Tennessee, spent my teen years in Wuhan, China and came back to the States for college. Graduated college and married my best friend this summer. Currently, my husband and I live in Memphis where he works as an accountant and I'm a nanny. I'm a health freak and I love to cook! :) Healthy food! I avoid sugar and caffeine (hence the number of sugar-free recipes you'll see coming from me) and search for ways to add fresh veggies and fruits to my daily diet. Having spent several years in China I enjoy cooking some of that cuisine to remind me of home, but truly I'm a huge fan of Tex-Mex (you know, the fake Mexican stuff) and Southern home-cookin' (which typically is incredibly bad for you - but it's good!). I love cooking for friends and family because it gives me a sense of contribution to the world. :) My senior year of high school I was still living overseas in China. We lived in a city of 8 million people, but we didn't have access to a whole lot of American foods/products. So we literally made everything from scratch. My mum decided that she wanted me to be able to survive on my own in the real world so she, the woman who had provided 3-6 course meals three times a day since I was born, handed the reigns over to me. I'd been helping her cook since I was little, but I'd never had all the responsibility of cooking three meals a day for my whole family. So for a year I learned how to cook any recipe she put in front of me, how to make up recipes, improvise when needed ingredients aren't available and how to plan (we would sit down at the beginning of the month and plan out three meals a day for a month so we wouldn't have any repeats and could keep our diet balanced). Probably the best thing my mom could have done for me - definitely a family tradition I want to pass on.