I am one of those people who loves to read cookbooks from cover to cover for ideas and inspiration. I live in Northern NJ in a beautiful lake community with my husband, two kids and a slew of pets. We keep a kosher home so sometimes I end up tweaking recipes to meet our dietary restrictions. By day I am a librarian but by night I am all about the cooking. Soup of almost any kind, Cream puffs with honey mousse, Veggies Baking Chanukah cookies together. Making applesauce with the apples we pick in the fall. Berries and cream with the berries we pick in the summer. Hosting a Passover dinner each year - many traditional foods but always adding at least one new dish. Creating menus and recipes with my husband who is an amazing cook too. Having my children help me in the kitchen and inspring a love of cooking in them. I won a recipe contest in a local newspaper when I was in High School for Tuna Salad. Not too many but one in particular was when my husband decided to make his own corned beef. He asked me to get it started boiling since I would be home first. I dutifully took it out of the fridge where it had been curing and placed it in the pot of boiling water along with some potatoes. When it came time to cut it and eat it, there was just one problem. It was incredibly salty since I had forgotten to rinse the salt off from the dry rub to cure it! Luckily the friends we had over were very understanding and ate it anyway. Maybe that explains why we went through so much beer that night too!