All this just goes to show, when you have that creative gene, you can use it for A LOT of different things! Baking, cooking, sewing, paintng, drawing, etc!

I love to cook as well but I love baking more.

I love anything to do with food; from growing it (including eggs and chickens) all the way to cooking, eating, and figuring out what I can do with the leftovers. I dehydrate much more than I can, but have recently gotten started canning again.
Feeding people has always been a passion of mine.
As a child, I remember standing on chairs stirring pots, and helping string beans and shell peas on the porch with my Aunts and Grandmother.

My mom always tells people I was a better cook than her when I was twelve. I've always cooked, watched cooking shows, and read cookbooks even as a kid.

I remember the first thing I ever made was homemade frosting to put on butter crackers with my Grandma "Goodie".

You know, I think I've found myself amongst real kindred spirits, since finding CC!!

Oh I do cook and bake very well (perfectly according to my friends and family).I hate cooking though ,prefer baking,i always have to come up with excuses why I can't cook for the whole clan.I'm happy to do it for my husband though ( not that I have a choice). The problem is I cant stand heat, that ,you cannot avoid while cooking.

My family will gladly tell the story of the night I made shrimp and rice, otherwise known as gruel (as in Charles' Dickens).
I would much rather bake than cook!

I am a very good cook and baker! I was a good baker first though, as I grew up making cakes and cookies and specialty desserts for my family. I only rarely helped with cooking dinner for everyone.
I started cooking all the time in college, as we had an apartment and no meal plan, so it was either get busy cooking, or eat ramen noodles. My college friends and I actually got into cooking fairly extensively and started collecting cookbooks......I have 167 actual books now, not counting the little cooking "pamphlets" and the 2 boxes of pages printed out off of the internet! My Amazon "wish-list" has another dozen cookbooks on it still.......so funny! I guess my friends and family would all weigh a little less if I was worse at cooking, but oh well. That's why I run! That's the price we pay!
I think a lot of how good you are at cooking is just experience, though. Because you need to get to the point where you can use the recipes more as a guideline and let your instincts take over. And you have to accept the fact that if you want to constantly be trying different recipes and such, you will have the occasional total failure. That's OK....that's what pizza delivery is for!

I actually went to Culinary school to become a Master Chef (big goals), after being around too many male egos (no offense fellas) in the kitchens and seeing the serenity of the bakeshop, I focused more on my minor than my major. Graduated with a dual degree, but stuck to baking. I save all of my cooking skills for dinners with family and friends. I think I'm an awesome cook, but more importantly, my friends and family say I am. (why does it feel so wrong to write that? Can you say humility? )

I can mostly in the fall, crochet and make rugs in the wintertime while watching TV, dehydrate in the spring and summer, that sort of thing. Even the busiest person can't do all of it all the time.

I have also said - I would be so happy to be a 1950's housewife! Cooking and cleaning all day! I love it!! When I was laid off in Oct. '06, my dad had to tell me to not cook/bake something everyday.

My cooking flaw? I can cook for 1, 2 or more than 8 people - nothing in between! We had had 7 ppl in the family going up so that's what my mom taught me and now we have 13 just with the original 7, BIL and nephews (only one sister is married.).

Oh, but I can't make a cheesecake for NOTHING!

I'm a really good cook but I don't like to cook that much. My husband has turned into a spoiled pig...if we have burgers for dinner, then they need to be bacon cheeseburgers with carmelized onions on homemade sourdough buns. If we have bean and cheese tacos, the tortillas need to be homemade, I have to make rice to go with it, and lately he's been demanding homemade salsa too...plus he wants a dozen tortillas to take to work too. If I cook a brisket, he wants homemade potato salad and beans to go with it.

I can make just about anything...but my favorite food to eat is anything which I did not have to cook.

For those of you who make pumpkin pie from fresh pumpkins, is there an easy way to peel and chop the pumpkin? I tried it before and it wasn't a pie pumpkin, so maybe that was the problem, but it took several hours. I did end up with a whole stack of ziplock bags of pumpkin in my freezer, enough to make empanadas for the rest of the year.

June Cleaver, Margaret Anderson, Donna Stone and Harriet Nelson are my idols. I grew up with a 1950's housewife mother, too!
Okay, you youngsters, do you know who they were?

I really hate cooking. I always said that if I became a multimillionaire one of the first things I would do is hire my family a cook! I'm not a bad cook really, I just don't enjoy it at all. I LOVE to bake though!

For me, the worst part of cooking is all the complaining. If one kid likes it, the other two HATE it, and vice versa. I used to keep a chart of my middle child's favorite foods and most hated foods because the foods would move from one list to the other in the space of a week.

There was only one dinner cooked. Sometimes they chose cereal or PBJ over dinner. (Sometimes I did, too!)

I am a very good cook. I grew up with a mom that worked and in my generation that was pretty rare but she was a great cook as was my grandmother. I started cooking and baking around 11 years old. I always started supper (that's what we call it in the south. Dinner is on Sunday's after church) before mom got home. I now cook they way she did, hard to give a recipe because somethimes it's a little of this or a little of that. I can tell if the biscuits are going to be good by the feel of the dough as I am making them. I love entertaining and cooking for others. Thanksgiving is a biggie for me. I also love grilling out and having the family over for holidays. My only daughter can't cook or bake water. She was never intersted in learning. My DIL however loves for me to teach her. Her mom was not a good cook and she thought there were a lot of things she didn't like until she tasted mine. LOL. The best compliment I ever got was when my grandmother told me that my chocolate meringue pie was better than hers.

LOL! Nope, we Yankees eat that meal that comes right before what ya'll might refer to as "Callin' hogs" time (bedtime)...we eat dinner. LOL!

Yes, in fact, over the past few years I've ventured out of my 8-sided box (all the ethnicities in my family) and taken a culinary tour of working with Mexican, Eastern Indian, and Tex-Mex spices (most recent). I tend to do a fusion with the seasonings I am already familiar with. I've also dabbled in barbecue, not the throw-it-on-the-grill, but authentic, smoker barbecue. I love the stuff, but it takes sooo long to cook through!

It took me a while to figure out all my grandmother's recipes. She took them with her when God called for her, so I was on my own.

I recently bought a book of Malaysian desserts and finger food, which I will experiment with more after the last grad cake and the baby shower cakes are all done for a while.

At present, I'm also making the necessary purchases to go wild with some truffle recipes that were posted in the chocolate thread. I want to get the chocolate transported and into the air conditioning before the weather gets too hot here.

Theresa

a lot of people ask me if i'm a good cook, because i'm good at baking. well, that is not always the case. i love to bake and i hate to cook. i'm okay at it...enough to get me by, but i wouldn't build a career around it!