I am 19 years old, and I am just starting out, living on my own with my wonderful boyfriend of three years. I am a daddy's girl, and I always used to love to watch him cook and bake in the kitchen. I was always fascinated that you could throw a bunch of ingredients together and come out with a whole new food. My father was a natural cook who hardly ever measured anything, except for when he tried a new recipe for the first time, and made it verbatim. After that, he would improvise and personalize it. I learned a lot about food and cooking from him, and everyone says I have his natural abilities in the kitchen. I love finding new recipes, mastering them, and then making them my own. I love apple crisp, and almost any variation of a salad, and I also love chinese stir-frys with fresh veggies. I am always looking for new things to make in the crock pot as well. I'll try just about any recipe once. My dad makes a great rich chocolate cake called a texas sheet cake, and I try to model my favorite dessert, fudgey brownies, after that. My mother is a good cook too, but she rarely shows off her skills. One of her specialties is buckeye candies made with oreoes. One of my specialties is parmesan chicken strips. They're a new family favorite. I recently found a great recipe for chocolate chip cookies with vanilla instant pudding in them, and it came out perfectly sized and cooked. normally, i have a hard time with cookies, because I either make them too small on the pan or too large and they don't bake properly. They were delicious... :) I recently made "one bowl brownies," a recipe on this site, and the recipe is a great one, nothing against that, but I tried to substitute a hershey's bar for the type of baking chocolate it called for, because that's what I had on hand, and I was just plain curious to see if it would work, and it was an inedible disaster. I even tried to salvage it with my homemade cream cheese frosting of cream cheese, sugar, cinnimon and vanilla, which is good on almost ANYTHING, and it still couldn't be saved... :(