I grew up in my mother's restaurant, and some of my childhood memories include helping to peel potatoes with the prep cooks after school! I've always loved food, and making recipes with pure and wholesome ingredients is very important to me. I love Greek food and learned most Greek dishes from my aunts and cousin in Athens, and from exploring Greece. It seems that most of my staple recipes are Greek ones - a good thing, since most are quite healthy - but I'm trying to branch out these days so that I can learn about other cuisines, too. I recently took a Chinese cooking class - my first foray into a non-Western cuisine - and realised I have loads to learn! I love Japanese food when eating out - sushi, ramen, etc. - but have no idea how to make anything myself. That's my next class! My mom's restaurant was called Viands. If you know even a bit of French, you might think that it was named after the French word for 'meat'. Not so - viands also means 'selection of foods' in Latin. So you can imagine that I had loads of great things to choose from growing up. Her restaurant had amazing soups and pies - all entirely made from scratch. The pie crusts were even made with lard - the best! She sold her restaurant about 10 years ago, and the things I miss most are the rice pudding, cherry pie, bean and ham soup, homemade hashbrowns, and booyah - a soup native to Green Bay (you can't even find it in other areas outside of Northeastern Wisconsin!). I made a Thanksgiving feast for my mom, grandma and sister once during university. They drove six hours Thanksgiving morning to come visit me, thinking that we were just going to go out for our Thanksgiving meal. Instead I'd prepared a roast turkey with all the trimmings, totally surprising them when they walked in the door. It's a great family memory. Honestly, there are too many to mention. I'm sort of a perfectionist, so if something doesn't turn out, it seriously affects my mood - ask my husband!!!