I have lived the majority of my life in Alaska. Durring high school I used to cook for a living, I started out cooking in various restaruants then I started cooking on the off-shore oil drilling platforms located in the Cook Inlet near Kenai, AK. I have even cooked on a 110 ft. fishing boat in the Bearing Sea. After a couple years went by I realized that I really liked to cook and I decided to stop doing it for a living. Now I cook simply because I like to and I enjoy trying new things in the kitchen. I am glad that I was able to recognise and make that decision early in life. Food is something that should be enjoyed, not labored over. I make it a point to buy something new that I have never tried before every time I go into a grocerie store. One of my favorite things to do is to go to the spice isle and pick a spice that I don't already have in my cupboards at home and then learn to cook with it. This method keeps me trying new things, learning new techniques and adding cool new gadgets to my kitchen. It is getting difficult to find spices at the local grocerie store that I don't already have nowdays though. On sunday's my son & I chop veggi's together for a veggi dipping tray and then we munch it down while watching the NASCAR race on TV. Another tradition is that before we go out on a snowmachine ride I throw something good in the slow cooker so that when we get home later in the day we have some good hearty food waiting for us. If you put a veggi tray and a candy bar in front of my two kids they will reach for the veggi tray. I started having them help me chop veggis for munching on and making our own ranch dip at a very young age and it has stuck with them even into thier teen years.........I consider that to be a triumph! When I was a kid (about12 yrs old) my friend & I forgot about some fatty pork chops in the oven and they caught on fire and almost burned his mom's house down!