I have cooked for many years actually, but never particularly enjoyed doing it. My husband was the primary cook in our house until ~2 years ago when I developed an unexplained desire to learn to bake bread. Since then I've also learned to enjoy cooking and am now the primary cook in the house. Breads, especially breads with whole wheat and other varieties of flour. I've studied bread making techniques of bakers Peter Reinhart, Laurel Robertson, and Daniel Leader. I've learned a lot from their books. I've made 60+ kinds of bread in the last two years. There is so much to learn about what makes one bread taste, feel and look different from another bread (aside from the ingredients, obviously). Not to mention the whole art of the sourdough. Norwegian baking. My siblings and I put together our own family cookbook featuring favorite recipes that we have discovered in our adult lives, but also many favorites that our grandmothers and mother have taught us. For a holiday get-together, we like to make all of those old treats to share: lefse, rommegrot, krumkake, flatbrod, rosettes, fattigmanbakkels, suet pudding, brown bread, aebleskiver (which is actually Danish) and so on. Ah, and oyster stew. We do NOT make lutefisk. I learned to make a special Norwegian celebration cake called Kransekake. It is an Almond Ring cake that is made up of 14 rings decreasing in size from a 10" diameter to a 2" diameter. The rings are baked and then stacked on one another to make a hollow pyramid which is then decorated for the occasion. It is made out of ground almonds, blanched and unblanched. It makes an impressive presentation. I made this Kransekake for my son's wedding reception and a bottle of champagne was hidden inside the Kransekake to save for their first anniversary. The Kransekake was placed in front of the bride and groom and the guests were invited to take a piece of the Kransekake from the couple while they wished them much happiness and good fortune. I had been working on growing a nice natural sourdough starter for some time. I was finally happy with it and made a new bread recipe which came from Germany. It made two beautiful free standing country hearth loaves dusted with wheat bran. The loaves were slid into the oven onto my baking stone on a piece of parchment paper and when I checked on them near the end of the baking time, they had a beautiful reddish golden crust. The recipe described the bread as having a fairly dark crackly crust so I wanted to give them another few minutes. When I shut the oven door again, the piece of parchment paper had been partially displaced and was left touching the inside of the oven door. When I noticed smoke pouring out of the oven vent and reopened the oven door, the tops of both loaves were in tall flames.