I am a stay at home mother of two beautiful daughters. Some one once said to me, "Hands full now, heart full later." That is my anthem, although my heart is pretty full right now. I love to bake cookies, cakes, scones, and bread. At restaurants, I'm pretty good at tasting individual ingredients in a dish while dining out, and then making the same dish at home. We save a lot of money that way. I've gotten some rave reviews from family and friends on my spinach pesto, and my lava flow is pretty good too. My mom always baked at Christmas. Our house smelled like cinnamon rolls, chocolate rolls, pani popo (Samoan coconut rolls), sweet potato pie, and cookies. To this day, I still bake at Christmas for all of our friends and family. My husband and I have started a new nontraditional tradition at our house. At Thanksgiving, instead of Turkey, we have pork tenderloin with all the trimmings. At Christmas, we choose a different country each year and make an authentic meal from that country for Christmas dinner. My husband and I have had enough turkey and ham to last for the rest of our lives. Our poor children will never know what those foods are until they move out! My scones will take anyone off of their diet. They are sooo good. No one can resist them. I like to put cinnamon chips in them. YUM! My pumpkin cookies are good too. I make them huge-- hamburger size! They're really moist and cake-like. I got both of those recipes from this site. When I was 16, I became interested in cooking. I would always practice making different things. One evening, I was practicing making gravy. I made enough to fill a 5 quart pot and it was so thick that it looked like a swamp. To make it look even more swampy, I had the heat up too high and it was bubbling and popping. That same year, I tried making bread rolls. I got pretty good at it and I was excited to make them for my dad. Well, the day that my dad came to our house to eat the rolls that I made just for him, he took one bite and he had a funny look on his face. He gracefully finished the roll and thanked me for making them for him. When I bit into a roll, I discovered that I had left out the salt. It was the nastiest bread I'd ever had.