I am a full time missionary with Youth With A Mission. I work with children and youth from lower class families. I am also in charge of the kitchen for our base. I cook for between 10-40 people daily depending on when when our training schools are. I am the oldest of 6 kids so I started cooking at a young age. My siblings all have some magor food allergies so I have learned how to be creative with my cooking. Finding meals that they could eat and like was a task but it taught me how to use spices. It seemed natural to cook for 20+ people a day as I was only cooking double what I normally would for my family. :) I love to bake. Bread, desserts, anything that goes in the oven! I also love to cook Italian food. I am half-italian and from New York so... :) Spagetti, Lasagna, Pizza, Cheesecake, and bagels are some of my favs. Mostly what I do though is take normal food/recipes and jazz them up. Especially living on a missionary base we are on a shoe string budget. So I enjoy making food that tastes like it came from a resteraunt but cost next to nothing! Being able to cook Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner for 30 people... That was crazy but amazing! I was making my special Chicken Alfredo for a group of 15 people. 20 min before dinner I decided to add a little corn starch because it wasn't quite as thick as I liked. I grabbed it out of the pantry and stirred some in. Five minutes later I tasted it again. It was bitter! I freaked out trying to figure out what happened. I realized that I had grabbed the cream of tartar instead of the corn starch! They were right beside one another in the cupboard in matching containers. I dumped the whole sauce down the drain and tried to make another batch. Problem was that I had used almost all of my ingredient on the first batch. It turned out to be a bland alfredo instead of my special one... :( I have since changed containers so that they aren't identical!