I have been cooking since I was a kid and had to stand on a chair to reach the counter to make sugar cookies with jelly in them for me and my friends on Saturday mornings! I find cooking to be so creative (and therapeutic) and I love to make people happy when I cook for them. I love to bake! I have a sweet tooth gone wild. My favorites are pies and cakes. I also love to bake biscuits, popovers and other breads. I am a southern cook, love to make country fried steak and gravy, liver and onions, chicken and dumplings, that sort of great home cooking. But I have fun making a great pot of chili and rice or spaghetti too. My father was an Army officer so my mother cooked and entertained a good bit and she had lots of great recipes from when he was in the service. But I got my country cooking from my mother too. I remember my grandmother cooking huge meals at lunchtime. She would have three or four meats, tons of vegetables, homemade biscuits and cornbread every day and always cakes, fried pies and cookies. I remember my grandmother and grandfather making homemade eggnog on Christmas morning with (lots) of bourbon and plates of her wonderful poundcake. I love to make her poundcake and fried pies--feel such a connection to the past. The best family tradition was making fruitcakes and nutcakes at Christmas, carefully basting them with blackberry wine every day (I always got to stay home from school on cake day to help). It was wonderful! My pies especially, but all my baking, because it is creative and you can make them so pretty in addition to being delicious, so they are really impressive! I really love the challenge of making the piecrusts, have perfected an oil crust that I love, it is so flaky. Just a great thing to do and eat! The time when I was a teenager when I attempted to make custard base for ice cream and the eggs cooked. My daddy gamely ate the ice cream anyway--it was rough on him, but he did it (I was definitely daddy's little girl, lol)!