I've been cooking since I was old enough to hold a spoon! Working part time while going to grad school has given me skills in cooking quick and thrifty meals. I love making Christmas cookies. My family has a long list of favorites we make every year. I also like improvising soup recipies based on what's on hand. Making lasagne from scratch every Christmas- homemade sauce, noodles, everything. It's a lot of work, but we make it a group project and have lots of fun! I'm working towards a Master's degree in nutrition. In one of my classes, Food Culture and Society, we were assigend to take a meal of high calorie, high fat and high salt foods and modify the recipes to make them helthier. My group managed to make a meal of fettucinni alfredo, Caesar salad, and chocolate brownies that was less than 800 calories, with less than 30% of the calories from fat and less than 700 mg of sodium. AND everything tasted wonderful! (Yes, we were graded on how the meal tasted.) In the same class, I was assigned to make a pumpkin angelfood cake. All I had to do was mix boxed angelfood cake mix with a can of pumkin and a little water, pour it into a cake pan and bake it. Somehow, I messed it up. I got a floppy pile of cake/pumkin mixture. Did I mention I got graded on this?