"Sophie" is the name of my little party poodle I received from my husband for a wedding present. We also have a boxer pup, a greyhound, and four cats who adopted me! I am a newlywed, mother of three grown daughters and recently the step-mom of four younger children! I love to cook and now have reason to since we have shared custody of my son's great kids.One of my hobbies (besides cooking and baking) is collecting cookbooks. I enjoy trying new recipes that I find on allrecipes.com. It's relaxing to me looking at the online recipes and fun to chose one to try. My husband is a "country" cooker so I'm learning how to cook like a country girl (lol). We both work full time so I love to learn how to whip up a good tasty meal in short amount of time! With our busy lives easy meals are the thing we look for but nice Sunday dinners that take longer are so enjoyable too. The big Thanksgiving feast and our prime rib Christmas Eves. Pork tenderloin Christmas Day and old fashioned ham at Easter. We also enjoy making Christmas cookies and spend hours going over the recipes...that's as much fun to us as making them! My daughter says her favorite food is my Sweet and Sour Chicken over rice..and my step daughter loves the thumbprint cookie I make with a buttercream frosting center. My husband loves the way I make city chicken and pork tenderloin...I love the marinade he puts on steaks and then grills them! They are the best! Probably the worst was when we picked patty pan squash from the garden this summer, cleaned them out (they looked sooo pretty I took pictures of them!) then stuffed them with this garlic, ground meat, bread crumb and rice mixture. They turned out so bad nobody could eat garlic for ages afterword!! I have had my share of "tragedies" although I just clean up the mess and plow forward!