I am a 17 year old chef. I have been cooking for the last 9 years of my life, but more recently in the last 6. I started from making home-made chocolate chip cookies with my mom, and now I make a whole wide range of things. I am in a culinary class at my school, and we do a student-run resteraunt, with our teacher (Chef) as our only mentor and supervisor. I aim to eventually become a professional chef because I would love to have a career I that I enjoy. I love baking, mostly. But I also really love to cook foreign foods. I have cooked food from Thailand, Bali (Malyasia), India, Greece, and Italy. I really really love to cook anything in general but foreign foods and the pastry arts and my main concern. There aren't many cooking traditions in my family. We have never really follwed our heritage's traditions. My mother cooks with herbs and seasonings, and has showed me how to use herbs in the best possible ways. My father shows me how to cook meat to the exact point where it can be at its best flavor. My grandmother (on my dad's side) shows me how to bake and to decorate the food that I bake. But my family really doesn't follow any specific foreign food preference. Anything that I have cooked successfully can't really be called a triumph. It just means I followed the recipe correctly. There are certain things I feel proud of myself for, but those aren't really 'triumphs.' For example, flipping an egg perfectly, not setting the house on fire (again), and successfully icing a cookie without Chef nagging at me that I need to find something else to do because Im ruining the Christmas cookies. I still have not managed to make a perfect divinity (any advice towards success will be welcome!) and I have also almost set the house on fire melting parafin for coconut balls. After the fire-incident happened, I didn't cook coconut balls again. Although I did try again this last Christmas, and did NOT almost set the house on fire again. I was very proud of myself.