I love to cook quick, tasty and quality meals. For example on a day like today 70 degrees in Atlanta, I would marinate and grill some salmon. With that I would have some garlic mashed potatoes and either a garden salad or vegetable medley cooked in wine. Our cooking traditions are first not healthy AT ALL. But they are loved just the same. One meal would consist of fried chicken, ham, collards, mac n' cheese, rice green beans, corn bread, mixed beans, turnip greens, sweet potato pie, pound cake, ice cream, iced tea or punch. This is a typical Sunday dinner for our families. When I first started baking I tried to make a sour cream pound cake. I had all of my ingredients. I mixed everything according to the recipe I found and poured the mixture into two loaf pans. After baking and letting the cakes cool I proceeded to cut one. It was as hard as a brick. I told my husband what happened, and he just laughed. I was devastated with wasting all of the sugar and butter I used for this cake. My mother in law gave me a hint. She said make sure that all of your ingredients are room temperatures. I followed that advice and now I get constant requests to bake cakes. One tragedy I had recently was I wanted some Chinese for dinner. We didn't have any money to go out but I had all the ingredients to make something at home. I made a shrimp fried rice, egg drop soup and some frozen egg rolls. Every thing smelled wonderful while cooking. When it came time to eat the rice ended up being too salty. I used a stir fried rice mix that I bought from the store (something I rarely use) and added soy sauce. This made this part of the meal very unpleasant. My family being the gentlemen they are ate the food and didn't say anything until after they were through eating. Needless to say all that chopping of vegetables, cooking and cooling the rice went to waste.