At 23 years old, I can see where it would be tough to believe that I have been cooking for over 20 years, but it's true. In my family, it was not an option to learn to cook. Coming from a family of 5 girls and 1 boy, it was important to my parents that we learn to cook for ourselves. I remember taking 3 days out of the week to cook for the family and falling in love. Now that I have a family of my own, I am instilling those same values and love for food. My parents are divorced so I was fortunate enough to be surrounded with 4 parents that love to cook, all with absolutely different styles. My dad likes to toy with jamaican and tai cuisine, my mother loves to cook our traditional puerto rican dishes and keep in touch with out heritage and is an amazing baker, my step father is a master on the grill, and my step mother is all pasta all the time! Since the first thing I learned to cook was traditional puerto rican rice, I cannot abandon that and still love to cook it for my very German/swedish husband who had never tasted real spanish food. However, since I spent most of my cooking years with my step mother I have a tendancy to make pasta about 5 times a week. I love to play with pasta and make different creations, where with spanish food, I very much enjoy keeping the authentic recipes alive, I don't mess with them! However, nothing beats the feeling that baking brings to me. My mother and I are very serious about our sweet treats and Every holiday season, midway between Thanksgiving and Christmas, my mom, all my sisters, my aunts, and family friends get together and do massive Christmas baking! This is not just your sugar cookies and pumpkin pies. My mom and I get together the night before and premix all doughs. The day of, we end up with an insane amount of all different holiday treats. Everything from rougalche, buche de noels, and pecan bites, to your traditional sugar, stained glass cookies, and much much more. We bake, tell funny stories and crack up laughing. Every year Christmas cannot come fast enough for this tradition. Especially around the holiday time, I am bogged down by requests for my famous jelly rolls. I started making my rolls in 9th grade when my french teacher assigned us to make Buche de noels. I was always the only one in class whose roll had stayed in one piece. Ever since then I understood that these were a challenge to make, and I LIVE FOR a good challenge. My most famous roll is my pumpkin roll, I (quite honestly) have to make around 50 of these just around the holidays mostly because they are my husband's favorite and requests these for other people to try and they of course commission me to make one for them and their mom ect... I cannot remember a time when they did not turn out perfectly, ( though I think they're yucky) I know how much people love them so I put my whole heart into making them and that is honestly why they ALWAYS come out perfect. I remember when my husband and I first moved in together, while we were dating, I was eager to show off my cooking skills. So we went to the store for him to pick out what he wanted for dinner, to my dismay he picked out a beatiful piece of tilapia. I have never been a fish eater and did not know the first thing about making it. I was hoping he'd request pasta, I knew I could knock his socks off with that, but nope, the man wanted lemon pepper tilapia. Once I got home, I convinced myself that this could not be that hard. Lemon, Pepper, butter, and a smidgen of salt. What I did not understand was that, one did not need 3/4 cup of lemon juice for tilapia to have a nice lemony taste. I served this to him and his face just about turned inside out. I tasted the fish and started tearing up. The fish was very sour yes, but mostly I was so embarassed, and thought he would never believe that I was a very good cook. 3 years later, we're married and he loves my cooking. I think he's forgotten abo