Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

I already cook most every meal at home, so that's out, right? I also already cook using fresh ingredients most of the time, so that's out too. I'm working on learning the nuances of my husband's diet to control kidney stones and finding that to be more difficult than I'd imagined. We're also working on only eating out one time a week as a family.

Favorite pork memory? The easy answer is the crispy, hickory smoked bacon I had for breakfast yesterday. But one of my favorites is a teriyaki marinated pork tenderloin that I grill several times every summer - a fabulous treat that the entire family enjoys!!!

There's a great little cheese shop near where I work: I always stop in to pick up something new and tasty before a social gathering. :)

I cook with lots of fresh vegetables on a daily basis, but tend to use up garlic really quickly. Right now I'm on a garlic-rosemary foccacia binge so it's getting a lot of use in our house (we've got rosemary growing in the yard). I've picked up giant bags of asparagus recently and find that when I go to cook the second half of the bag it's gone bad - so I won't be doing that anymore.

I don't have an awful lot of cooking mishaps in my history - probably because I take such things far too seriously. The worst thing I've done lately is adjusting to a gas oven - it seems to get hotter than electrics and I've overtoasted garlic cheese bread a couple of times and overcrisped the skin of a roasted chicken.

I was fortunate enough to learn how to make cornbread from both of my grandmothers back home in Tennessee. Now that I live in California, the only cornbread I've found worth eating is what I make for my family.

I'm a huge Crescent Dragonwagon fan and would truly love to have this addition to my collection of her cookbooks!

While I'd like the historically impossible meals as much as the next person: sitting down to dinner with Jesus, Mohammad, Gandhi, Shakespeare, Aristotle, Plato, Mother Teresa, Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, and so on, I'll stick to the possible meals I would have. I would love to have my last meal with my family, extended relations and all and if it's my last meal, I'd like to prepare my lasagne (based on Craig Claiborne's NY Times recipe), salad, fresh bread and some nice brownies. When you're with people you love you don't need fancy meals or fancy places - the love you share is enough and the food becomes a vehicle for transcendence.