I love to travel, do genealogy research, and watch the wild birds in my back yard. Pretty much I'm a geek at heart. I am usually a lazy cook since I have to take care of my son, but pre baby and marriage I used to love to make gourmet meals for my mom. I talk a lot, and you'll find most of my reviews to be long winded! I love Italian food and seafood. I'm married to a man who is allergic to shell fish, so I no longer cook it. I eat it whenever I can though! My son is allergic to milk, eggs, and tree nuts, so I'm always trying to find things to cook so we can have a family meal. I try to cook relatively healthy foods and if a recipe calls for 4T of butter, I will try cutting it in half. I LOVE LOVE LOVE garlic. My poor mom always did the cooking, even every holiday! Our tradition was to be lazy and just eat it. I guess my favorite thing she would do was make all the different kinds of Christmas cookies. My favorites were her rum balls (intoxicating!) and King Gustoff cookies (not sure of the spelling). Probably making these delicious New Zealand mussels in a spicy saffron, onion, tomato sauce. The recipe was from a restaurant cook book called Cha, Cha, Cha. The restaurant in San Fransisco was always PACKED! That's easy. It's the day I learned to always wear latex gloves when handling chili peppers. I was making the New Zealand mussel recipe which calls for a habanero chili. So I'm sauteing the red onion and chopping the chili and somehow I get chili pepper in my eye and up my nose. Now, I'm a really clean cook and careful about washing my hands so I don't know what I did. Anyway, I was sitting in the chair trying to stop crying when I realized that the onion is now burned. I had to make a special trip to the store just to buy another red onion! I had since washed my hands a million times during the course of the day and that night I took my contact lenses out and burned my eyes AGAIN. The next day I went to put the lenses back in (they had been in the cleaning solution all night) and they STILL BURNED. I had to toss them. Nowdays you will ALWAYS find disposable latex gloves in my kitchen!