I am the lucky wife of a wonderful man, the mother of four incredible boys and a professional educator. I am also a semi-professional photographer. We live in fly-over country with our black lab, Shadow. I like to cook vintage recipes and collect old cookbooks. I love recipes with a colorful past that can be tied in to my family's history or regional favorites. My children love Mexican and Italian foods so I have been experimenting a little bit. My children and I bake many, many cookies at Christmas, and they always do make-your-own-pizzas on Christmas Eve. Christmas is always ham, and my boys can request anything they want for dinner on their birthdays, which usually means pizza or wings. I learned to make chicken parmegiana, my husband's favorite dish, ALMOST as well as his mother! Any attempt at baking yeast bread has met with disaster. Those little yeast spores just don't like me.