I'm a law school student with an undergrad degree is in classics and philosophy. I grew up baking with my mom. I took over making all desserts for all family occasions when I was like 15 and started carrying on some of my Italian grandmother's traditional recipes when she got too old to cook. I also took over doing Christmas dinner for her (my mother works Christmas Eve every year so she couldn't do it.) It all kind of sparked a love for cooking and I started trying all the recipes I could! I took to posting pictures of things I made on facebook recently and friends are bothering me to start a food blog, but I'd rather just cook! desserts strufoli and my family's traditional lasagna at Christmas, wheat pie at Easter! the first time i tried making strufoli by myself, i didn't have a thermometer to check the temperature of the oil. i didn't remember my grandmother's method of testing it (which, as i later found out, was to drip a bit of water in the oil to see how it reacted), and so i added some of the dough balls to test the oil. they turned pitch black instantly! i was young and sort of freaked out because i was pressed for time, so i tried to pour out the oil and for some reason turned on the faucet in the sink. hot oil explosion! luckily i wasn't too badly burned - it was bad at the time, but it didn't leave a scar. the kitchen was a disaster, though.