I worked in restaurants for about 12 years and now I plan Destination Weddings. I assist with the event planning as well as the travel, so food is still a huge part of my day. Planning menus is one of my favorite things about that job. I just love cooking! I have a wonderful son who is 5 years old now. Wow!!! His father and I go to lots of food and wine shows for date night, which is a blast. I enjoy throwing parties for any and every occasion. Ok, who really needs an occasion? I travel as often as possible. My favorite restaurant during all of my travels is called the Taco Factory in Cancun, Mexico. Wonderful. I think I have been there at least 10 times. Nice to meet you! Chicken and jalapenos. I love both of these ingredients more than I can describe. What fun things to eat and work with. You can use chicken for anything of course, stuff it, grill it, marinade it. So many possibilities and so versatile. I love jalapenos because they aren't too spicy or too mild in the pepper world, and of course you can find them anywhere. I love using the red ones as well. The vibrant color is so fun to work with. Thanksgiving would probably be the biggest for us. I have been in charge of cooking for Thanksgiving for the last 3 years now and I just love it! I was so scared to cook a turkey the first time, but I used a recipe I found on allrecipes.com and it turned out amazing! Now, I can't wait for thanksgiving to come. We also have my Cranberry Puffs, and your typical green bean hot dish (thanks Dad for that recipe!), candied yams (thanks Mom for that one!), etc. I like to make hot garlic mashed potatoes and Caesar salad rather than the traditional potatoes and spring mix though :) Officially a large baby shower people. It was a couples shower and we had a chip and dip bar with consisted of my spicy black bean dip, fresh guacamole, Fire & Ice Salsa from allrecipes.com, and a cool cucumber salsa. We also had a dessert buffet, the Cuban Mojo Chicken from allrecipes.com, a salad bar, yellow curry rice with pineapple, green onion, and raisins, as well as made to order goat cheese croquettes (Thanks Tania for those!). The day couldn't have been more perfect!!! Along with the good comes the bad. The first time I fried my intricately stuffed egg rolls wrappers I burned them to a crisp. They were black and inedible. I've also managed to forget to add oil to a cake that I made and you can imagine how disgusting that turned out. Whoops!