I have been married to my wonderful husband for 13 years now. We have two beautiful children, a daughter (11) and a son (9). My husband is from Italy, and I've learned a lot about Italian cooking from his mother. She came to stay with us for 7 months when each of our children were born. Needless to say, we eat a lot of pasta around our house. Our children complain that we make too much "gourmet" food ... but it's funny when their friends eat over for dinner and say things like "that was the best chicken I have ever tasted"! They don't appreciate our cooking now, but hopefully they will when they are older. I love to bake . . . breads, cookies, cakes. My husband makes homemade ciabbata bread almost every week. We love all kinds of food, and enjoy trying new recipes. When I was a young girl, my job was to do most of the candy and cookie making around the holidays. I still make the same things I made when I was a little girl, and am trying to hand down these traditions to my children as well. Every Thanksgiving, I make a big traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Both of our families live far away, so we always invite our friends or neighbors over to share this meal. Too many to count. Probably making yeast breads. After a couple of failures, I finally got it right. I was making toffee, and had the pot on the stove waiting for it to reach the proper temperature. My phone rang, and I thought ... of I can make this quick and come right back to the toffee. Well, about a half an hour later, I was still on that call in my office, and couldn't get off of the phone. I started to smell this burning smell. By the time I got back to the stove, the pot was as black as coal, and the whole house was filled with smoke. It was winter time - so I took the pot outside and dumped out the black tar right onto the lawn. It instantly solidified and looked like blacktop!!! It took DAYS to get that pan clean. The next time I made candy, I made sure to let that phone ring!