Finally learning to cook after living in places where I couldn't really use the kitchen. It's one of my new favorite hobbies. One of my favorite parts of cooking is feeding people a good, home-cooked meal that is hard to find in our busy culture. I love trying new recipes, especially ones that are healthy and simple, and adapting old recipes to make them extremely flavorful without a lot of oil and fat. Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything has been my go-to resource for a lot of recipes and knowledge. Soups of various kinds, 3 bean chili, red curry chicken (still with Trader Joe's sauce - I will learn how to make this someday!), simple pasta, rice dishes My mom makes a mean gumbo, chicken pasta salad, enchilada casserole, mac and cheese, and others. Cutting up my first chicken! What a piece of work. My most recent triumph is making a lasagna bolognese - $50 dropped on ingredients and 6 hours time spent on the various steps yielded the most amazing lasagna I have ever tasted. I want to make it again but I think that will have to wait about five more years until I've properly recovered. A tragedy but not quite: reconstituting dried apricots, wrapping them in prosciutto, and baking. The prosciutto was too dry to mold around the fruit like bacon does and the apricots were way too tart for my tastes. However, my husband loved it, so not quite a tragedy.