I am currently 27 years old, married for five years with a toddler and am now a very happy stay-at-home-mom! My life passions are my Christian faith, my family, working for pro-life causes and pro-environmental causes and promoting homebirth midwifery. I became passionate about cooking in high school and am now a self-confessed recipe hog - if you serve a good dish, I'll probably be emailing you for the recipe! A huge majority of my recipes are baking recipes... I love baking cakes, puddings, cookies - anything sweet! I am embarrassingly prosaic with savory recipes - I generally have to try something that someone else has made before I'll venture into the unknown with a main dish. Thanksgiving and Christmas, of course, especially decorating Christmas cookies on Christmas Eve (a habit grown purely from procrastination and a subsequent rush to get them done). Also, Martha Stewart's fried chicken in the summer, BBQ ribs on July 4th, yummy birthday cakes, green enchiladas, and a ton of other things. My mom is a great cook and we have a ton of traditions, not to mention those that I inherited from my husband's family - and now my husband and I are creating even more! Every time I make a pie crust without resorting to tears is a triumph for me, as I can almost never make one well, and they always look like patchwork anyway. A big triumph for me was learning to make homemade pizza (it took 2 years to perfect!) that my husband adores. If I ever learn to make roast beef like my mother-in-law, that will definitely go on this list!!! Well, the first was an overnight crockpot BBQ pulled pork recipe that for some reason came out smelling remarkably like vomit. It was so bad that it woke me up in the early morning hours! We tried to eat it just because of all the work and expense involved, but it ended up in the trash. The second was the affair of the mysteriously exploding baking dish. I was baking chicken when I heard, from another room, a sound like a bomb going off, and after searching the house for ten minutes to find the cause, I opened the oven door and found our oven coated with millions of razor-sharp glass shards and the chicken sitting on the bare rack. Needless to say I was quite angry with the glass company, as if it had exploded ten minutes later, when I was going to take the chicken out, I would have ended up in the ICU. Needless to say, I immediately went through all of my cupboards and threw out every piece of bakeware that I owned by that glass company!