With a Filipina mother & a Southern father, I grew up eating some really great food! I'll try *almost* any dish once. My husband and my son, however, are 2 picky eaters in a pod. Thank goodness for my daughter - she'll eat practically anything! My challenge is to find new foods that we can all enjoy and maybe something that will get the 2 guys in my life to step outside of their culinary comfort zone. :) Whether it's cookies, brownies or cake, I love baking! I especially like to bake treats as gifts. My mom would pull out all the stops on Thanksgiving. Though it was only my mother, brother & I at home, we would always invite lots of friends over to celebrate and eat good food! Some of my fondest memories are of getting up early and helping mom in the kitchen. Now that I have a family of my own, I've started making the big family meals. I love it when my kids ask me to help out. I want them to have the same kind of happy memories in the kitchen that I do! Any time I get my kidlets to try something new; any time I master yet another Filipino dish from my childhood. When I was a child my mom had no problem with me experimenting in the kitchen (as long as I didn't burn the house down). A friend and I spent an afternoon creating "the perfect cookie". We threw in everything we thought sounded good - sugar, flour, vanilla, cinnamon & COPIOUS amounts of food coloring! When baked, they were floppy and were a curious shade of greenish gray with blue and red swirls throughout. We had a lot of fun watching our parents choke them down (they tasted like you just put a teaspoon of ground cinnamon in your mouth). But best of all, they BOUNCED!! Okay, so they weren't that great as cookies but at least we had a lot of fun balling them up and bouncing them on the kitchen floor!