Though I live in New York currently, I'm a Nebraska girl at heart and cannot wait until I can move back to the middle of the country. I'm a graduate student studying American History, and I'm always looking for a new way to distract myself from studying. Enter, allrecipes.com. In seriousness, I'm trying to force myself to expand my cooking horizons. Supper for me often consists of a scrambled egg or a chicken breast in the oven. I realized recently that life will always be busy, and I may as well start learning how to fit cooking actual food into my schedule now. There may come a point in my life where I want to make something more than scrambled eggs...or someday I will starve my family. :) I have always enjoyed baking, but, regrettably, woman cannot live by chocolate cake alone. Things with chocolate! I really enjoy baking. I also enjoy sending cookies to people, so I'm becoming something of a specialist of cookies that can be shipped. I'm also learning to enjoy soup because it easy to divide up and store in my little apartment. Usually, if it involves chocolate, it comes out fairly well! I'm pretty good at desserts, including this wonderful chocolatey pie that is a family recipe. Recently, a friend left a pan of chicken strips in my oven right before I had to leave town for two weeks. About a week after I returned, I decided to make cookies and preheated the oven. I couldn't find my cookie sheet, but failed to put the pieces together. I smelled burning, but again, failed to comprehend the situation. Finally, I looked in the oven and saw some very charred chicken strips becoming one with my cookie sheet in the oven. I tried to take them out, and proceeded to dump them onto the burner. I didn't have any tongs, and they were far too charred for a fork, so I had to just shut off the oven and wait until it cooled down to retrieve them. I've never seen anything as black as that chicken charcoal in my life.