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My favorite family dinner is Carnitas (pulled meat tacos) with lots of cheese, lettuce, salsa, and sour cream. If the season's right the salsa is salsa fresca and we have guacamole to replace the sour cream. The tacos must be soft made of corn, and gently fried just before serving.

I enjoy Hell's Kitchen. I'm not a fan of the vulgarity, fake drama, and bad cuts. I like the show because of the contestants. There are always a few strong cooks, normally silent until they have to speak out, that are worth watching.

Hell's Kitchen is skill based. But it challenges the contestants to do more than just cook. They have to prove they can cook, can work at any station in a brigade, they can work with anyone, they can run a brigade, they can create their own dishes, and finally they can run a brigade serving their menu. They are given very little support. The victories tend to be time away from the kitchen, while the punishments revolve around the boring, hard, and repetitive tasks in the kitchen.

My old oven heated my kitchen like a furnace when it was used. In the summer, this caused great consternation; I love to cook, but even fans of the BBQ can get sick of the BBQ. I wanted to make stuffed chicken breasts for 7 and I was trying to figure out how to sautee them. I just didn't have enough pans to do all the breasts at once. And, it being summer, didn't dare us my oven.

It was suggested I use off-heat grilling to roast them in the BBQ. They made quite a mess, but they came out with a distinctly pleasant smoky aroma that went deliciously well with the feta cheese and fresh herb stuffing. The olive oil basted breasts were a bit crunchy on the outside, but so succulent. And it left me time to get the rest of the meal together while keeping the kitchen cool.

Mark Bittman's works have made me more conscious of the amount of meat I eat. I now cook more meat-light and vegetarian dishes. I've always loved to cook, but his uncomplicated style of cooking has inspired me to play with recipes again.

For a long time I wanted to be an elegant cook--and somewhere along the way of figuring out how to bring elegance to the table I forgot how to cook in a simple fashion. I forgot that cooking is fun. Now I'm back to a more minimalistic approach and the elegance seems to have appeared on its own. :)

What a great list. I'm definitely taking notes. My favourites are:

1. Quesadilla. Cooked meat and/or vegetables + cheese + salsa in a pita--warmed in a hot pan.
2. Tacos. Protein of choice + seasonings served with finely chopped vegetables + sour cream
3. Black beans. Flavoured with cumin, served with rice, twice-fried and served with pitas, or added to soups and chili's.
4. Soups. Homemade stalk, adding leftovers, legumes, in-season (or frozen) vegetables, and served hot.
5. Pulled pork sandwiches. The cheapest cut of pork -- slow cooked with seasonings until it falls apart. Mixed with more seasonings and served on bread.
6. Crock pot stews. Allows you to cook with cheap cuts of meat, winter vegetables, and lots of legumes.
7. Polenta & tomato sauce. Easy and tasty.

My favourite sauce is Rick Gallop's bolonaise sauce. Cooking it makes my apartment smell heavenly for a day or so.

In the fall I make it with fresh roma tomatoes (skin still on), and herbs straight from my balcony. It takes some time for the mixture to cook down to my preferred consistency (as thick as I can get it), so I always make sure to have a fresh baguette on hand to "test" the sauce from time time.

When the sauce coats the baguette like a spread or thick stew (instead of like a soup), its done. It freezes well. And is also an amazing sandwich spread. To serve it, I often add a bit of the pasta water to thin the sauce enough so that it will coat the noodles evenly.

Pennyroyal is from the mint genus and has a very strong spearmint smell. Nepitella, by contrast, is like a minty oregano and tastes amazing with shrimp.

My favorite Italian ingredient is rosemary. I use it in almost every Italian dish I make - I even use the plant's thickest stalks as skewers for roasting shrimp, chicken, beef, and/or potatoes on the barbecue. Next to oregano (or nepitella when I can find it), rosemary is by far my favorite.

The most important thing in cooking has nothing to do with what you cook or how you cook it.

The most important element in cooking is your audience. You see it in cooking shows (where the food's always judged), in restaurants (where the critics help us pick a restaurant before we've eaten there), and in each and every home (where parents/guardians keep trying to feed picky eaters). If it wasn't for the audience there'd be no world-famous chefs, no four star ratings, and -- most importantly -- no food porn.