I'm the mama of the most beautiful baby ever! She'll always be my world. ;-) My other passion is cooking. It is my main hobby, followed by gardening and the outdoors. My biggest cooking influences: my mother, an incredible gourmet who hosts fantastic parties, my grandmother - who was an exceptional and well-known country farm cook, my mother-in-law - who has a knack for making both styles very adaptable to busy everyday cooking as well as big family cooking, and my husband - who is fearless, willing, and has and incredible natural instict for what will taste great! I believe the fun and challenge of cooking is that there is no perfect recipe for any one person/family. Tastes and cooking styles vary and sharing is so wonderful, gifting a person a piece of your home, famil I love perfecting new recipes and I love preserving old recipes. I am just thrilled when I get requests to recreate or perfect a recipe friends or family have had somewhere. I own more cookbooks than I can count and my knack is reading books, watching shows, and combing the net to combine, eliminate, and perfect a basic recipe. Something as simple as perfect scrambled eggs intrigues me (I think I have them!). My shrimp bisque, my Springfield, MO - style cashew chicken, my SEAFOOD GUMBO!, chicken marsala, beef stroganoff, carrot soup, and my star - my cornbread and hush puppies - are among my most requested recipes. You have to be careful when you cook for non-cooks, or you end up having to cook their same favorite requests over and over while you're stuck wanting to try new recipes! :-)) 1)Holidays, especially when my Grandmother was alive. She was SUCH an experienced and good cook, she made it seem effortless. We have a huge family and everyone participates. Summertimes there is the smoker and salads and slaws, fish frys and bbq, fruit pies, and in the winter - piles of the MOST comforting comfort food! 2)weekends w/my mother-in-law - she's always trying something cool and new and I've NEVER (honestly - she's not even going to read this :-)) had ANYTHING bad she's ever made (it's really kind of sickening - I mean, NO mistakes?!) 3)Whenever I visit my mother in her city flat, we always make something incredibly gourmet and chic - this is always so much fun. We both save these kinds of recipes to try for when we are together. The first incredible thing I ever made entirely on my own I was 8 and I found a recipe from my mother's Gourmet cookbook for chilled watercress soup w/leeks. We had wild watercress in some of our spring-fed streams in the Ozarks, which when I identifed it kind of got me thinking, and I actually succeeded in making a very wonderful soup. This was a surprise gift for my mother, my first attempt at cooking something that wasn't just passed down or instructed to me. Since then, I have (after many attempts) finally mastered: the PERFECT hollandaise!, sourdough breads - which I still work on and try to mess with..., Alfredo, souffles, pie crusts, biscuits, creme brulee, and hush puppies. I keep a list going of my next attempts. ewwwwwww. I have had many, but I really try to block them out. My most frustrating ones were when I had just started putting together big meals and just COULDN'T get everything timed right. Something always burned and something always came out underdone or flavorless. I couldn't recognize a bad recipe just by reading - which I am getting better at. Dishes that have really flopped? - 1)my first cake - I still don't know what happened - it fell so flat in the center and the outsides were hard, porous, burnt, and crusty (think black lava rock...) 2)mac and cheese - the first few times I made it, it just wasn't like my grandmother's at all. She never had a recipe, so I had to just try to recreate by memory her technique... These were just the first to pop up as having made me so disappointed and frustrated! But I take all bad recipes and personal cooking mistakes w/ a grain of salt and keep looking and trying. Its the pleasure of actually cooking that I enjoy.