I'm a Southern California girl, but I've traveled to 30 states, Mexico and the Bahamas. As a Girl Scout I learned about all kinds of cooking, and what I didn't learn there, I learned from my mother and my extended family. They gave me a sense of adventure and a willingness to risk in all areas of life, including cooking. I do a lot of cooking for retreats and church events. I've earned the title "Kitchen Queen" in more places than I care to name. I love cooking just about anything for other people, especially if I can take a basic recipe and add my own creative touches. I love making main (meat) dishes from ethnic cultures other than my own, adapting recipes for gluten-free and/or sugar-free needs without resorting to toxic chemical substitutes, or surprising my friends with a new recipe for an old favorite. I love making painted cookies with mace in the cookies and egg yolk paint (the whites go into the cookies). My mom makes the best lemon meringue pies, and my sister has the best chocolate chip cookie recipe. We have the most fun Christmas candy recipes. It's always my job to make the mashed potatoes for any family meal. We also make strawberry cookies from a recipe that a friend of mine gave me years ago. The whole family gets into the act, from toddler to grandma. I made a roast accompanied by roasted fruits (instead of vegetables) with onions for the Cardinal's dinner with our staff. It was a tremendous hit! Everybody was surprised when I was cooking, but loved the result. I made a salad lunch for a women's retreat with 12 different salads, mostly off-the-top-of-my-head adaptations of different recipes I had heard of, but never seen, eaten, tried to make, or even seen a recipe for. It was one of the most requested repeat lunches, and impossible to do, since I didn't work from a recipe, or a list, or have any paperwork to reproduce many of the salads. My first cooking tragedy was when I was about 10 years old. My friends and I decided to make lunch for our mothers. We ended up with green glop. Our moms made US eat it. The younger kids weren't happy because they had to eat it too. It actually didn't taste that bad, but it looked terrible, so we were choking it down. My younger sister even threw it up, just to be dramatic.