I live in New England out in the farm country. As you can imagine, you will never have seafood like you will here and the harvest is everyone's favorite time of the year. The summers are beautiful and the winters are dismal. But I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. I love cooking with fresh ingredients so I love the summertime. And I am a big fan of fruit and vegetables so I'll add as much of those as I can to any recipe. My favorite thing to bake is pies (which never last long enough) and to cook is probably pasta dishes. I am an American mutt so I have a mixture of cultural backgrounds. Thus the family traditions that I have are pretty mixed. One thing that we've made for generations is crepes, and we have perfected the art. Most of what else we make is usually a mixture of European cuisines, mostly Mediterranean. My senior year in college, my roommate and I successfully made a full Thanksgiving dinner for 30+ hungry college kids. When I was 12 my mother decided that I should take over some cooking responsibilities so she put me in charge of dinner one night. Somehow I managed to light the steaks in the oven on fire while simultaneously making mac and cheese that was both crunchy and mushy beyond being edible. It was 4 years before anyone let me cook in the kitchen again. I’m a good cook now! Honestly!