Hi! My name's Jess and I'm from Norristown, PA, currently living in State College. I'm a senior at Penn State University working on a degree in German. I'm currently in the middle of losing a very large ammount of weight on the South Beach Diet, so I'm getting much better at being creative with my cooking--mostly figuring out carb-free things that taste great. I love to cook for my wonderful boyfriend and he's extremely appreciative of my attempts at delicious low-carb foods. I was brought up on "meat'n'potatoes" which made the first stage of the South Beach Diet quite interesting--I was in LOVE with my dad's potato recipes and my mom's baked goods! Learning how to cook low-carb has been a challenge, but I've succeeded thus far. I've found/made up some recipes that taste as good as their carb-heavy counterparts. My apartment's smoke alarm and I used to get along. But that one was recently replaced with a much more sensitive version which loves to beep if I even so much as look at the stove.