I live with my boyfriend of 5 years, and have a son (6 years old) that I see two-three days a week. Every other Sunday he comes over for the day and wants to help make dinner. I enjoy reading and am active on paperbackswap.com; whenever I have a spare minute I have my nose buried in a book, which DBF loves to tease me about :) We also foster cats for a local non profit, but I have avoided crazy-cat-lady syndrome so far! My limit is three cats at once, but it's usually two unless the rescue is overloaded or they get an adorable kitten (which I know will get adopted soon at any rate)! This summer we doubled the size of our vegetable garden; I have now learned to can my own veggies and have a brand new pressure canner! I love to have people over so I can try new recipes on them; I'm always making new recipes or changing old ones. I enjoy baking sweet stuff most of all, but there's only the two of us so I can't do it as often as I'd like. Also, I love the way fresh bread makes the house smell. Actually I don't have any official family cooking traditions at the moment, other than homemade cakes for every birthday. My son loves to help in the kitchen, which I think is great. I hope one of his favorite memories is helping in the kitchen with me. We also garden all summer, and he gets to see firsthand where the food is coming from. We harvest, process, and eat the veggies all in one day, and this is one 6-year-old that loves his veggies; I will never need one of those 'hide vegetables in your spaghetti sauce' cookbooks! If DBF liked it, it was a triumph :) He's a little picky. I can't make grilled cheese sandwiches. Or pancakes. Luckily, I have the best boyfriend ever, and he has these wonderful sour cream pancakes that are just awesome; and if I ask really nice and do all the prep work, he makes the best grilled cheese-tomato-turkey sandwiches EVER! Oh, and I'm getting really good at burning things in my crockpot (because it's huge and I keep thinking I can scale the recipe down...) And most recently, trying to make a balsamic reduction for DBFs birthday...which left me with a beeping smoke alarm and a layer of charcoal in the bottom of my last clean pan. No more trying to do 4 things at once! At least the cake turned out...