TasteTester

about me

Our family moved to Orlando, Florida, from New York in the 90's, so I've brought not only many of the recipes my family has passed down, but found some great Southern dishes as well.

In my spare time, I like to try different types of crafting, especially for the holidays. One of my hobbies is collecting Dickens Village pieces. Over the years my collection has grown so much that I finally can't fit anything more on my "Dickens Village" display table, but I still like to create a different village setting each year.

We have two cats: Reggie, who's very nosy; and Whitey, who follows me around like a dog. We also have several hermit crabs. They are quite interesting to watch, and my son likes to occasionally put them on the floor in a straight line and have "hermie" races. The little ones always win.

I'm teaching my youngest son, Michael, how to cook and he's prepared several simple recipes I've found here.

I like to try recipes representative of different countries — there are so many great dishes I've made from RZ that I would never have known about, and I rate recipes as follows:

5 stars — Superb flavor; recipe ingredients and amounts need no changing for our family's taste; will definitely make again and again.

4 stars — Great recipe, enjoyed by all; might make a minor change to recipe, but will make again.

3 stars — Good, but would only make again with a fair amount of tweaking.

2 stars — We might never make it again — but I wouldn't post a review of 2 stars unless there were specific changes I felt would improve the recipe overall, not just for our tastes.

1 star — I've never made a recipe that fell into this category, and if did I wouldn't want to rate something so low that it might discourage a person from posting more recipes.

Below is a photo of my son, Michael; he's with my daughter, Lora.


This is a shot of my son, Jeffrey, with his wonderful girlfriend of 7 years, Amanda.


And here's a photo of my son, Matthew, with his wife, Mercedes.

Favorite Foods:

My favorite foods are steak, seafood, veggies, and anything hot and spicy. I've also made some vegetarian dinners for my son's girlfriend, Amanda; they've tasted really good and are a healthy alternative to all the "meat and potatoes" dishes I grew up with. I've found lots of recipes with grains, tofu, etc. here and try to incorporate a few into our weekly meals.

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