Transplanted Yankee. Learned to cook when I was in junior high when my folks were both working. Ended up cooking every recipe in the Betty Crocker cookbook, and I've been cooking ever since. I own 2 crock pots, an 18 qt turkey roaster, a Crock Pot BBQ-Pit, and a convection/micriwave. I still cook a lot, but with bipolar and migraines I have times where opening a can of soup is just too much. So, I make a lot of soups and stews to have on hand for those days.
My favorite things to cook
Soups, stews and chili,
BBQ (low temp for a long time),
Ribs of any type,
Grilling,
Anything I can crock pot,
Homemade liqueurs, wine and yogurt.
Some canning,
and lots more.
My favorite family cooking traditions
My Mom's Mom did a lot of baking, a pie every day, a cake on the weekend, and fancy Austrian style pastries for Thanksgiving and Christmas, She could make pie crust by touch.
My Dad's Mom did a ton of canning, and I used to love to go down to the basement to see all her colorful jars lined up on the shelves. We had Thanksgiving and Christmas meals there too.
Nothing like that anymore though, kinda sad.
My cooking triumphs
I guess the snack thing I made up for the last Christmas Eve get together at the Episcopal church I belong to. No one there had any idea I could cook, so when they found out out I made the snack they were very surprised. They were also very pleased. I took pitted dates, butterflied them, put cinnamon/cardamom flavored cream cheese on the opened halves, added dried cranberries and walnut halves, and pushed it all back together. I made something like 50 of them, and they went like hotcakes.
My cooking tragedies
Oh, that would have to be the time I set a chunk of milk chocolate on fire in my microwave trying to get it unfrozen. Well, you cook something too long in a microwave and you've cooked all the water out of whatever, so the chocolate was like tinder. Burned like it too, and stink...
Years later I was working with my conv/mic unit to cook a recipe for a pork roast using the combination of those two cooking methods. I recalculated the cooking time, and made the nice sauce to add with a half hour to go. When I went to add it, I had a brick... I had worked out the time for the recipe just perfect, but I never allowed for my roast weighing about half of what was in the recipe. So, it cooked twice as long as it should have. Really Hard - I couldn't even stick my carving fork in it. Lucky it didn't burst into flames too...