I've lived in Tennessee my entire life. I enjoy it here, the weather is wacky but wonderful. I grew up with my Granny so, I learned from an early age how to cook Southern food. I'm slowly starting to get myself out of the habit of putting butter and grease into everything I cook. I enjoy baking, gardening, reading, and finding new ways to change old unhealthy recipes into modern healthy ones. I LOVE making red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting. It was the first cake I ever made from scratch and I got both recipes from this site. I like to find something that I like in a restaurant or bakery and try to replicate it at home. It's fun figuring out all of the ingredients. I also like devising ways to sneak in boca meat or vegetables into my cooking with out my fiance noticing. (I'm veggie and my fiance is not) For as long as I can remember, my Granny has made an incredibly elaborate Christmas lunch. Complete with every Southern fattening sauce, gravy, meat, side dish and dessert you could think of. For the past two years, she's passed the torch down to me and I've had my family and my fiance's family over for Christmas. I love it! It's so chaotic getting everything prepared (especially for that many people) but the end result of having the people you love sitting around enjoying food that you made (with help from others of course) is one of the best feelings ever. RED VELVET CAKE. I made it the first time for Thanksgiving dinner two years ago. The first scratch cake I'd ever made, and it turned out perfectly. I've made it twice since then and it turns out great each time. Thanks Ms. Gale Gand for your awesome recipe! Also, whenever I feel like making a nice, fattening Southern dessert, I just call up Granny and she gives me a fool proof recipe every time. Chess pie and banana pudding are my fav's to make. It's sort of funny listening to her tell you the ingredients though because she doesn't even use measuring cups so she has to figure out how to translate her method to a standard one. :) I tried to make blondie brownies once, and failed miserably. They were extremely chewy but somewhat ok while they were still hot from the oven, but once they'd cooled it was like a big, chocolatey brick. I couldn't even get them out of the pan until I put them back in the oven to heat the dish. What made it such a tragedy is that I had been talking about how great the brownies were going to be all through dinner and when we got to them, they were awful! I had to smother them with icecream to disguise how bad they looked. :(