I'm an aspiring cook in my mid-twenties. I dabbled in cooking for my family a bit prior to college, but in the past few years of living on my own it's been cook or starve, so I'm definitely starting to come into my own. I like to play around with new recipes and work on recreating some of my family's old ones. I'm not quite at the "make up your own recipe" stage of the game yet, but hope to be able to do so in the future. I bake a lot. Cookies, muffins, cakes, loafs etc. I also like to work a lot with ground turkey and chicken, since I don't eat pork or red meat. I love cooking Italian and Mexican and experimenting with new poultry and vegetarian main dishes. My mother is an excellent re-heater. To my grade school teachers, she was known as "Mrs. Entenmanns." My Nana, on the other hand, was an amazing cook and I'm trying to follow in her footsteps. As a child my family always went to a restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner, but for the past two years I have cooked Thanksgiving dinner for my family at home. There are only 6 of us now, but it still feels like a wonderful accomplishment putting together a menu (frequently comprised of recipes from allrecipes.com!), shopping for ingredients, cooking all day, and of course the "ooo"s, "ahh"s and "mmm"s! My pinnacle cooking tragedy was in 7th grade Home Ec class. I had been placed at the one cooking station in the classroom with a brand new microwave, and was instructed to melt a stick of butter. I put the full stick, foil wrapping and all, into the microwave and hit start. The rest is history....