I am a fisheries biologist in Alaska. I like to catch and eat fish. I strive to eat healthy nutritious foods that are fairly simple to make and inexpensive. I have too many cookbooks. My mom, a hillbilly originally from West Virginia spending most of her life in California, collected cookbooks. When she left this world, I grabbed the ones I thought were worth keeping. My mom also had her own recipes, many handwritten in a box, with a bunch of other stuff. My dad, the quintessential Italian from Connecticut, doesn't use a cookbook. He is a jazz drummer. He cooks as if he's playing jazz, he improvises. He's been doing it all his life and he's quite good at it. Seemingly simple things, like his meat balls, I can not duplicate, no matter how many times he tells me how he did it that last time.