I live to cook not cook to live! I am a homemaker and I have been married for 27 years of my 45. I have a daughter 24 and a son 25. My son loves to come home with his wife and daughter every chance they get to eat and my daughter loves to come home every chance she gets to be in the kitchen with me and invent new recipes. I have been working on a cook book for years. It is taking so long because most all of my recipes are in my head and in order to get them down on paper I have to make it and measure everything because when I cook I never measure anything. I am known in my community as a cooking diva. I am constantly in my kitchen making up new things and then taking to my neighbors or to the local store or other places for people to try and give me their honest opinion. They let me know if I should add it to my cookbook or not. I guess most people would consider me nuts because they have never had anyone go around giving out free gourmet food before. I love southern, french, italian, mexican, south western,irish,german. Let's just say I love to cook everything from southern to international. I can cook desserts from chocolate eclairs to baklava. I like all types of pies and the hardest cake I ever made was a "Buche de Noel" I don't have any old traditions with older family members but my daughter and I have started our own traditions. At Thanksgiving she comes over the night before and we get started on the desserts and getting the turkey in the brine. Then we cook most all day on Thanksgiving while my husband stands by to wash everything we dirty up and has it ready to use again. Christmas is a little different. My daughter and I spend days and days before making up so many candies,cookies and cakes and each year we try to out do the year before. Then we hand out gift baskets along with her homemade Irish Cream and my Coquito to all of our neighbors, friends and family. Then I have a special day of cookie baking with my three year old grand daughter and my daughter in-law. We always have a Christmas eve party with hot and cold finger foods and festive sweets for family and friends. Our Christmas meal is most always prime rib. The most impressive thing I have made was a Yule Log. It's proper name is "Buche de Noel" I watched it made on television and then I took off to the store and then came home and made it and I called my daughter in-law over to take a picture of it. Now when I show people the picture that I have in my notebook of other foods I have made, they say, "You cut that out of a magazine didn't you?" This is sad but true. Back in 1995 while the O.J. Simpson trial was on television I was home alone and of all things I was cooking I was frying frozen fries in a tiny little cast iron skillet. I only had about 3/4" of oil in it. I had the T.V. on the trial and after I took out the fries to drain I ran back to watch what was happening and I completely forgot that I had cooked those fries. I noticed smoke going out of the window and I went in the kitchen and discovered the pan was on fire. I knew to "just put a top on it" but instead I picked it up to move it over to another burner first. I have done it a hundred times or more in the past, however when oil is on fire it is very thin and it came out of the pan and coverd my hand. I had second and third degree burns and had to go back and forth to the burn center for over a year. The worst part was I couldn't cook for almost a year! Because I was burnt so severe, it was in our local news paper and they wrote it up to be all O.J.'s Fault.