I am a single mother of a 15 year old son. I have a couple of jobs and run a non-profit on a volunteer basis. I like to cook meals that make my son feel good about coming home for dinner. Because I have to work a lot at night, I use the slow cooker a lot so that even on the nights when I'm waiting tables, my son can still come home to that "home-sweet-home" feeling of a hot meal ready and waiting for him. I'm Irish American, but have lived all of my adult life in the Latino community and I was married to a man from South America. When we were in Colombia I learned to make empanadas from my mother-in-law. I still make them now for my son every Christmas and hope to one day teach his children how to make them, too. I once accidentally used unripe garlic cloves in a baked chicken dish. To my horror--and my son's delight--the garlic turned bright blue and turned the chicken I was cooking blue, too. Other than being blue, it tasted fantastic. My son still talks about that blue chicken, but I've never been able to quite reproduce it--neither the flavor OR the color! lol. I once tried to make habanero pepper sauce. Instead of blanching the peppers briefly, I boiled them for half an hour, filling the whole house with home-made pepper gas. It was so strong we had to evacuate the house and open all the windows to get rid of the pepper infused steam. The rest of the family wasn't too happy with me for awhile after that.