I have been cooking since I was tall enough to reach the stove(over 40 years). My mother was a wonderful cook and made most of our meals from scratch. I learned from her and went on to experiment on my own. I am not formally trained, by any measure, but I make healthy, tasty meals from everyday ingredients. The only drawback is that when my children went to college, they had a very hard time eating "dorm food"...YUCK! I find it disconcerting that the "younger generation" thinks cooking is opening a box and following directions. It's an adventure to take raw ingredients that don't cost a fortune and put them together to make a tasty and nutritious meal. My favorites are some very old fashioned standards like beef stew, pot roast, my special spaghetti sauce, and plum dumplings. I make lots of soups too. Baking is my passion, especially some old eastern European recipes. My plum dumplings and a traditional nut roll called "Potica" are my prized recipes. Both are time consuming to make but well worth the effort and both recipes are generations old. I think feeding a family of 4 well balanced and tasty home cooked meals almost every day is certainly a triumph. One of the funniest mistakes I made was in making pumpkin pies. I forgot to put the sugar into the filling and didnt realize it until I took the first bite. YUCKY!!! I rescued the pies by scooping out the filling, adding the sugar and mixing well, then smoothing the filling back into the shells again. Believe it or not, it worked beautifully. It looked a little funny, but it tasted just fine after the fix and the whipped cream hid the look of the pies.