I'm a native Texan living and working in Edinburgh, Scotland. I try to recreate all the food I miss from back home as best as I can (especially Mexican!) I love, love, love to bake. Cheesecake, Apple Crisp, Dewberry Cobbler...anything. But I don't usually eat much of what I bake. My mom is a really good dessert maker. She is the one who taught me to bake. I used to live in a co-op and cooked every week for 20. I was only 18 at the time, so I had to learn very quickly or I would have a house full of unhappy people. I was making a soup for everyone in my co-op (20 people) and needed to put ground pepper in to the soup. However, as I was shaking the pepper in to the soup, the top of the shaker came completely off...I poured almost an entire huge container of pepper in to the soup. It was completely ruined and I had lots of hungry people depending on me. Also, after a trip to Italy, I fell in love with gnocci and wanted to show my boyfriend how lovely it was. So I spent over 4 hours slaving away trying to make homemade gnocci. It turned out completely awful. It was chewy and just not edible at all. A few days later, I went to the grocery store and saw a bag of refrigerated gnocci for £0.99. I tried it and it was really really good. What a waste of time and effort!