About Me

Starting at the beginning, I have to say cooking was my first hobby. Since before I can remember (and before I could reach the counter) my parents would sit me on the counter and ask me to stir and pour pre-measured amounts of things into a bowl. As time went on I remember being allowed to pour chopped veggies into hot oil (I remember because it was exciting when the oil popped and sizzled). I remember the first thing I cooked on my own was Top Ramen noodles. And the first thing I cooked for someone else was blackberry pie (with the stems still attached!). In my defense, I think I was 8 years old; my blackberry picking skills and pie-making skills, I am happy to say, have improved immensely since then.

I could fill a book with all my experiments and inedible attempts between then and now.

I haven't spent a day of my life out of the kitchen, even if it is just to make tea.

One of my favorite family traditions was picking our favorite meals for our birthday. Mine was always eggs Benedict for breakfast, shells and corn sauce for dinner, with chocolate cake raspberry filling and cream cheese frosting for dessert.

I don't diet in the traditional sense. I like balance without restriction, because I feel that leads to more sustainable, lifelong success. So I maintain an awareness of what I eat and adjust portions to meet my health goals.

My love of food has lead me to want to share all of my favorite recipes, which I can't always do with my vegan and vegetarian friends, or family members with Celiac Disease. So I make it happen by creating a recipe I can share. Part of my motivation for doing this is because I developed some strange allergies in my 20s and couldn't have a lot of my favorite dishes anymore. I didn't want anyone else to miss out either, and thus creating new recipes was born.

That was a glimpse into my love of food. I hope you enjoy all my food posts as much as I enjoy coming up with the recipes and eating them :) Be sure to follow the blog to get updates about all the scrumptious recipes!

The next hobby came along shortly after cooking when I was 11 or 12 years old. My dad gave me a corner of his garden and said I could plant whatever I wanted. I chose carrots, radishes, and peas; two of which I am now allergic to , and it sucks. The gardening, however, was so much fun! I wanted a patch of dirt everywhere I went. The only place I did not have a garden was my first apartment (I made the mistake of agreeing to a 2nd floor place with no sun on the small outdoor balcony).

Thankfully, that didn't last long.

Now I have an apartment with a huge kitchen and an amazing outside yard, for an apartment. The bathrooms can barely fit one person at a time, but you take the good with the bad, right? I have a couple of peach trees and plum trees and one grapefruit that I have been dragging from place to place with me; they just started producing fruit for the first time last year. I really need to find a permanent house and put them in the ground or in a few more years I won't be able to lift them anymore. Most of the other things I plant are seasonal, so I don't have to worry about moving them from place to place. I have a small pond out back, which I fertilize the garden with on a regular basis.

This brings me to my third hobby.

Aquariums: I was exposed to my first tank when I was 19. It was my boyfriend's tank. He (the boyfriend, not the tank) is now my wonderful, intelligent, and handsome husband. The funny thing is he doesn't like tanks anymore and I like have a tank in almost every room of the house. Back then he had a 10-gallon tank with one goldfish and one plecostomus.

If you know anything about tanks, then you know this was a recipe for disaster.

I didn't know that then, but got lucky because I didn't like just one big fish and wanted a school of many little fish. So, I traded in the gold fish and tried my luck with Shadow-fin sharks: another disaster. For those of you who don't know this: Shadow-fins are brackish or, put more simply, they like salt in their tank; so much so that they can be acclimated to salt water if you wanted.

People sell them as freshwater fish, even to this day!

So, I lost three before giving up and moving on. Later on, I started to research them and discovered the water they liked. I never did end up keeping them though because I also found out they get big and I have not had a tank big enough to keep them yet.

Someday I will though, fear not.

A couple years after this experience, I started working at Shasta Pets in Redding CA. There I became the aquarium specialist. The fish room was all mine: all 200 tanks or so. Unfortunately, this amazing store went out of business, but I have been working at little fish and aquarium businesses similar to Shasta Pets for the past 11 years while putting myself through college. I now have a 65-gallon reef tank, a 20-gallon planted tank, a 50-gallon Japanese Ranchu tank, and a 100-gallon pond. One of these days I want one of those coffee table tanks :) Here is a picture of my reef, and my two Picasso clowns.

Interested in more? Visit my Career website

http://mrwhitecareerportfolio.yolasite.com/