I'm married to a great guy - Bryan - and we have 3 gorgeous girls - Katherine, Emilee and Olivia, ages 5, 3, and 2. I love to cook! I am always trying new recipes. It's like a hobby for me. I like to try not only new recipes, but new tastes. Thankfully, my husband is more than willing to be my guinea pig. Anything! I love to try new dishes! I guess my favorites would be things that look like they're really fancy and took a long time, but are really simple. I grew up with a very southern cooking style - my mom was always frying something, be it pan fried or deep fried. She didn't really experiment with new dishes or new ingredients, but the food was always good and always comforting. I have tried to be more adventurous and so I guess my tradition is just trying new recipes! Of course, there's nothing like going home to Mom's cooking! We used to live overseas and the American products we could get were very limited, so I had to learn to make things from scratch that I didn't know could be made from scratch! I learned to make barbecue sauce, doughnuts, granola, pancake syrup, tortillas, salad dressings, and lots of other things. It was exciting to be able to share those things with our ex-pat friends and also just to know that I could do it! I really haven't had a lot of tragedies, if you overlook forgetting something was in the oven! I guess the most recent tragedy happened when my mother-in-law sent me a bottle of a spice that was in an unmarked jar. I thought she said that it was paprika, but when I used it for a fish dish that I made, I found out that it was cayenne pepper! We couldn't figure out why we were coughing so much when the fish was cooking, but at the first bite, we knew!!