No one in my family ever liked to cook. My mother wouldn't attempt much outside of anything that came in a box. Since I was the only girl out of five children, my grandmother took me under her wing when I was about 10 years old and taught me everything she could about cooking. She gave me a lot of her recipes and showed me a lot of neat little tricks. I soon became the cook of the house and to this day my family still relies on me for the holidays and family gatherings. I don't mind at all though...I love it! I love baking! Any kinds of pies, cakes, bars, cookies. I love seafood so I am always trying new and healthy ways to prepare fish and shrimp. Coming from Iowa, however, meat and potatoes are a big part of any meal so anything with them I enjoy as well. I love cooking for lots of people! We don't have a lot of traditions since no one else really cooks in my family. Around Christmas, however, my favorite thing to do is spend a day making all my Christmas cookies, candies, and bars and I can usually recruit one or two people to help me decorate! I usually turn on the christmas music and it's such a great time! I've had to cook for a lot of people on many occasions and I've always been able to handle doing everything by myself. Sometimes I'll have as many as 10 dishes to prepare and I've learned that if I get a system down and get my timing right with everything it really goes very smoothly! One time when I was probably 14 I was trying to make dinner for everyone and I hadn't quite got all my little tricks down yet. It was even something as simple as spaghetti! I had a large amount of noodles boiling (I think I was feeding 15 or so people) and was trying to make my sauce and my butter and garlic mixture for the bread and I must have had the noodles set too high and wasn't stirring them enough because by the time I got to them they had stuck to the bottom of the pot and burnt! I thought I could salvage the rest of the noodles because only the bottom ones were burnt but the rest of them had such an awful burnt taste from boiling in that water with the bad ones I had to throw everything out!! I was so mad!