Bonnie’s friends and family know her baked beans are a delight, but one batch was a disaster. “They didn’t soften,” she says.

But that setback pales compared to her biggest success: She cooked a complete turkey dinner and baked several pies in an oven with a broken thermostat.

You can often find Bonnie experimenting in the kitchen, sometimes with one of her biggest influences: her daughter.

The smell of eggs will forever remind Francis of her worst cooking moment. “I forgot I had eggs boiling and left the house. My husband arrived home before me. When I pulled into the drive, the doors and windows were open and black smoke was rolling out. The smell of burnt and exploded eggs was horrible!”

Fortunately, that experience was tempered by a kitchen success: making a seven-layer cake. “It was delicious and pretty.”

For Sarah, Washington, D.C., is a great food city. “There’s so much mixing of cultures that you can really find any type of food or experience you can think of.”

Pasta’s one of her favorite foods: She frequently craves spaghetti and has mastered making seafood pasta.

When not in the kitchen, Sarah enjoys sitting and relaxing by the water.

An operations supervisor by day, Adam dreams of bass-playing stardom in a rock band. Meanwhile, however, he channels his creativity into his cooking, especially when making his most-requested dish: crab imperial.

Adam clearly remembers his worst kitchen disaster. He had left the kitchen, where his roast beef dinner for eight was resting on the counter. Suddenly he heard the platter sliding across the floor. “My roommate’s black Lab had eaten the entire roast!”

Adam loves experimenting, whether it’s at home with his KitchenAid stand mixer or out in the woods. “When we’d go camping, at the end of the trip we’d make a dish by combining whatever was left. You never knew how it would come out.”

 Lisa Steffen

As if planning a wedding isn’t time-consuming enough, Lisa was also the caterer (and florist) for her recent nuptials. “It was perfect,” she says. “I received so many compliments.”

Lisa’s just discovering a latent food talent: constructing unusual three-dimensional cakes. She says she’d love to have a little bakery one day, with specially created cakes and unique baked goods.

For the moment, she’s the pricing clerk for a grocery chain, which gives her the opportunity to find new favorite foods. The current one? Arugula. “I can’t eat salad without it!"