I'm 31 and a stepmom to 4 beautiful little ones! I love finding and cooking new meals for them, and it's the best thing in the whole to hear them tell me I made a GREAT dinner. I like to throw a touch of gourmet into everything I make, and can't follow a recipe to save my life. But judging by some of the reviews and edits of people's recipes on here...who does?!? My biggest challenge is finding a happy medium between 'gourmet/restaurant quality' versus 'kid-friendly,' not always easy when kids are so conditioned to eat whatever out-of-the-box they are fed at the day-care, or in the car, etc. I want them to grow up open minded to food and learn to cook along with me so they can carry it on to their own families someday. Memories are everything when you are growing up, and I want their memories of our time together and the food we grew/made to be the most wonderful times of their lives. My other interests are home remodeling, reading, writing, playing the guitar, painting, and CA Fajitas (best way to use leftover steak, pork, etc.), pot roast, shredded pork tacos, salmon with caper sauce, crepes, apple-topped pork loin, meatloaf (regular and mexican-style), baked scones, sourdough bread (just starting to learn the tricks of the trade with that one!), homemade pizza crust...... I come from a Swedish family and every year in March (crappy time of year in northern Illinois where I grew up, needed something to pick up everyone's spirits amongst the vast gloom between the Christmas holidays and springtime!) my grandmother would whip up a huge authentic Swedish Kroppkakor dinner. I remember my grandma holding me up to the stove and opening the large dutch-oven so I could see what was inside, it was the most revolting sight I ever imagine putting in my mouth; gray, mushy blobs bobbing around in some industrial-sludge-colored liquid...as a 10-year-old child this, combined with my uncle's beloved pickled herring, was about as stomach-churning of a meal I could imagine! Well the Kroppkakor was actually balls of potato with crumbled sausage inside. It was to be eaten with butter on it, and the leftovers could be sliced, fried, and made into sandwiches. But my sister and I thought it resembled soggy, dirty snowballs; food is all about presentation to a kid! It took 1. Pulling a few 5-star (well, ok, maybe 4-star) meals out of my butt in hotel rooms back when my husband and I first started dating and he was traveling all the time...we would try and get extended-stay hotels so that we had the mini-kitchen...I would pack a laundry basket full of the utensils I would need, my small slow-cooker, and a cast-iron grill-pan and all the food we would need. His company would pay for us to go out to eat, but we got sick of it, and wanted to see if we could ever have a domestic relationship together, so we tried to re-create a 'home' on the road as much as we could! My first attempt was a beautiful red-wine beef roast with cheddar-garlic mashed potatoes, and he says it's still his favorite meal that I make! 2. Once our bank accidentally pulled our house payment a week early, and we had written a bunch of checks for other bills and sent them before we realized what had happened. So the next paycheck was cent-for-cent spoken for to cover the shortage...we Throwing a child's birthday party on the hottest day of the summer. We didn't turn the air on, despite the humidity, because I knew I would be heating the house up anyway with the oven/stove on all day. Figured we'd turn it on when the cooking was done. Well...the cooking never really GOT done. The 8-year-old subject of the day's endeavors had requested something called a 'chocolate-chunk-cake.' Upon internet research, I could find no such thing. He said kind of flippantly, 'why is it so hard? You just make it out of a box!' Apparently it was something he had had before at a relative's house. Disgusted, I told him, no, I'm making you a REAL birthday cake! So I found something in a cake cookbook my sister had given me, which was apparently above my less-than-intermediate level of baking. Once I showed Keagan the picture, he would have nothing less than the gorgeous, multi-level chocolate confection, laden with white frosting in between and oozing cherry sauce. I bought some