I love kids and I love baking - so baking with kids is the best! I'm one of 9 children, and we were always involved with food. Working in the garden, cooking with my Mom, eating my Dad's awesome homemade bread - I've always spent a lot of time in the kitchen. My daughter would stand on a chair to reach the counter when she was little to help me cook and bake. She's grown up now and an amazing cook. I look forward to continuing the tradition with my granddaughter as soon as she gets old enough! Someday I'll take her to the Holy Grail for bakers - the King Arthur store in Vermont! I love to bake. The smell of homemade bread baking is the best. My dad's bread recipe is the best I've ever come across. Scones, cookies, you name it, I'll bake it. My favorite part about cooking is the chopping - I love to chop! One of the best presents I ever got was a set of Wusthof knives, they are amazing. Chopping is so relaxing, and chopping keeps us healthy, eating up all those vegetables. :) I think my favorite thing about cooking is the sense of continuity that comes from using family recipes. I make bread for my family from the same recipe my dad always used. Making Sunday pot roast like my mother-in-law did. Baking my mom's famous Christmas cookies every year with my daughter like my mom did with us. All of those things connect us to dear family members, even when they're gone. Making goat head soup in a hut in Africa. There with the church team on a short mission trip, the folks killed a goat to make a special meal for us. I asked if I could help, and spent the day making goat head soup, blood sausage, and chaphati with some of the most special women!Afterwards, my friends and I sang a little ditty we made up - Mary had a little goat! I'm lucky enough to have a "cool" mom, who always let us in the kitchen as kids. I remember my first experience with raw chicken very well. Mom asked me to trim off the fat, and I couldn't tell the fat from the raw meat - trimmed away most of the chicken! But mom was a good sport about it. :) Another time, I pulled out the oven rack to check on my blueberry pie. The pie slid backward as the rack came forward, oozing hot filling inside the oven, making a huge mess and a horrible burnt sugar smell! That was when I came to hate the saying "easy as pie"!!!