I am a Ph.D. graduate student in chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After graduating from Tennessee Tech University, I have just recently moved to Chapel Hill with my fiance (a guinea-pig for new meals!). I have a large kitchen, and I am using it for all it is worth! I love to cook pasta dishes (seafood and lasagna). I recently am learning to make my own pasta...and I enjoy cooking Mexican, Mediterranean, and Indian cuisine. One of my friends in college is Indian, and he showed me all sorts of secrets to Indian cooking. I enjoy cooking, but it is made doubly enjoyable when you have someone wonderful in your life to share it with! My mother taught me how to cook lots of things, including pork chops, shrimp jambalaya, fried fish, king ranch chicken, lasagna, stuffed pasta shells, crabcakes, and beef stroganoff. I also cook some desserts, including cherry cobbler, apple pie, and applesauce cake. Recently, I found a recipe for this beef sirloin stir-fry with teriyaki sauce. I decided to modify it, and I had never cooked it before...I used pork instead of beef, lots of vegetables (it didn't call for any), and shitake mushrooms...it was amazing and the fiance liked it very much! The worst cooking tragedy I had was sweet potato biscuits. I still haven't got them down. The first time they turned out like cookies because I added too much butter and they just sunk down into the pan. Then the second time they were too hard. I had a friend at Tech that would try them everytime I made new ones...he was never satisfied, and I am still searching.