I'm a 25 year old native of Kitsap County in the beautiful, abundant state of Washington. I love the Pacific Northwest and all the culinary delights that it has to offer! Fresh crab, salmon, oysters and clams, mushrooms and much more! Along with cooking I also enjoy snowboarding, scrapbooking and crafts, summertime, running, the outdoors, yoga, being involved in church, and fun nights out on the town with the girls! When I am not working or doing homework I like to try out new recipes and expand my knowledge in the kitchen! I love cooking Mexican - it's so easy, however it's usually comfort food and not diet food! Anything with veggies, steak, or shrimp, as those are my usual staples! I love Italian but I find that it's easy to just cook Italian and end up eating it solely for a whole week. I would rather have more variety! And I love cooking with ingredients I've never worked with before or that I don't see around very often. Every year about a week before Christmas, a few of my favorite ladies (Aunt Ronnie, cousins Holly, Nikki, Heidi and Veronica, and on some years a visiting sister or guest) participate in Cookie Day. We sleep over at Aunt Ronnie's the night before, and when we wake up, we get to bakin'! While we have holiday music blasting, we gossip and laugh and make holiday cookies of all sorts, and we do not stop until we can no longer move! The dining room and sometimes living room tables become covered in assortments of cookies cooling off, before we assemble them on to holiday platters to gift or bring home to our families. Each of us has "our" recipes that we make year after year without change. I love trying new and attractive recipes, and even tried assorted bars one year. Decided not to do it again because it got too messy and time-consuming to cut and plate them on the platters! This is a tradition that I wouldn't trade for the world, and we all look forward to it each year. If anyone has a Almost every time that I cook is a triumph, because it means I am continually learning. Especially when I make something I've never tried before that comes out successfully! My tomato gratin and honey lime chicken enchiladas were probably my favorite hits! I remember trying out a beer-battered fish recipe from this site with a boyfriend back when we were on a bar food/diner food kick... Well, we don't own a deep fryer so we attempted frying the battered fish over an electric stove in a large pot just filled with oil! We had no idea how to test the oil for its readiness at the time, so the fish burned up so badly.. It was inedible and my apartment smelled bad the whole evening! I never did rate that recipe because I'd love to give it another shot, once I get a deep fryer for Christmas or something! And I once made a delicious-sounding pumpkin manicotti (also from this site) but I substituted too many ingredients and it came out pretty bland. I would be willing to try it again though, with fresh pumpkin and sticking to the recipe!