Hello again

Since one of the biggest things in my life is cooking, with all that comes with it, the planning, shopping, cleaning up, etc, I think I'll dust off this ol' blog.
Let me outline a bit of my world for some background.
I was always a great cook as a kid. I was in 4-H, took cakes and cookies to the fair, saved all the best recipes out of Seventeen magazine (I'll bet they don't even have recipes anymore), and cooked or helped mom cook most meals at our house. Often on the weekends, I'd spend an afternoon making something more time consuming, like homemade pasta. I saved up my babysitting money to buy a roller pasta maker out of a catalog, it was from Italy! (It now is used for polymer clay)
In college, there were times I didn't have the means or time to cook. In a dorm room with a mini-fridge and microwave, and a meal ticket to the cafeteria, I didn't do much cooking. When I had an acutal apartment, I did cook when I could. I remember one inspired batch of a pasta dish with 3-4 different kinds of pasta, veggies, tomato sauce, cheese and meats, that I got so into cooking, that I had to find people to share it with. I took a pan to a couple small families I knew, and called the party host to ask if I could bring the other huge pan there.
Fast forward a bit:
I've been a single mom for over six years now. Cooking for just kids and maybe making myself cheese and crackers was the menu for most of that. A little over a year ago, my wonderful boyfriend moved in. He loves to eat, likes to cook sometimes, loves to argue with me while we shop, helps with cleaning up, and mostly challenges me to be the great cook I always used to be. Plus, my kids are getting more interested in cooking, my younger son, now 13, has gone back and forth with wanting to be a chef or a starving artist, and is a creative cook.
I'm working with some good tools, All Recipes is awesome. I get their recipe-of-the-day e-mail, and several of those have become favorites. My profile there is seeshells if you want to look me up. Also, working with a great program A Cook's Book, which also has a Yahoo! Group. This tool I'm still figuring out, but we researched several recipe programs before we bought this one.
And my favorite cooking tool, is Alton Brown. In my kitchen, everyone knows, if AB said it, it's gospel. I love the other shows on the Food Network also, I have often spent a whole weekend afternoon with that channel playing while I'm doing chores or arts-n-crafts.
I guess that's all for the background of me for now. I need to plan out the grocery list, the guy and I have a date to go to the warehouse store, and the regular grocery store. Fun will be had by all. I hope ;p