I'm a happy young transplant to the desert southwest. The local food here is amazing, and I have no clue or time to prepare it properly, so I'll leave that to the locals! However, I do have a knack for making those delighful northern dishes that are more difficult to find here, and occasionally try my hand at baking, although it's not my forte. I have a wonderful job as an engineer and the rest of my free time is taken up by reading, running, and caring for my "Yuma family" (my fellow transplanted friends). Bread machine bread, bundt cakes, pasta dishes, casseroles, meatballs (I'm Norwegian), chili, stews, anything in the slow cooker, anything any of my friends requests for dinner. I'm always looking for new things to try, and am dying to figure out how to make some great Lebanese food. I came from a family of two working, divorced parents so my grandmother picked up a lot of the slack. She taught me how to do most of the cooking I now do including her to-die-for goulash and popovers. She also made the best pumpkin roll and Russian teacakes around the holidays. My dad's chili is the best I've ever had with fresh baked bread out of the bread machine, and my step-dad's orange marmalade cedar planked salmon is out of this world. I make a dish now fondly known as "chicken most favorite" by my friends. It's a slow cooker dish with chicken tenderloins, lemon, lots of garlic and an oregano coating. My lasagna (a modified recipe from allrecipes!) is also a big hit and requested all the time. Making "Butte-style" pastys from scratch is also one of the longest, but most rewarding cooking days of my life. There have been too many to name: overmarinated Italian flank steak pinwheels that tasted like beef jerky, over-cooked salmon, forgetting flour in chocoate peanut butter cookies, and undercooked stuffed chicken breasts are just a few.