If there's one thing we love doing together as a family it's cooking. We spend summers grilling meats and veggies, and the winter months making soup and chili. Over the years our family has created something of a weekend ritual that involves both the adults and the children in our house. In fact, it's gone on long enough it now includes grandchildren.

Many years ago, I started watching Saturday morning cooking shows on PBS. I was intrigued by what these chefs could do in their kitchens. I had never been a bad cook, but always felt like I necessarily know how to get started. Cookbooks are great, but the pictures don't move and I discovered that's what I really needed to take my cooking to the next level.

For a while I just watched the shows, feeling like much of what I was viewing was outside my comfort zone. After months of watching the same chef each weekend, I started to feel like I could take on some of the easier dishes, so that's just what I did.

I had been recording these cooking shows so I could replay any segment I wanted. This ensured two things. The first, I'd be able to get the ingredient list and quantities just right. Second, I could watch and re-watch their techniques to ensure I'd get that right too. Trust me when I tell you it gets expensive ruining quality ingredients because you don't know what you're doing with them.

Over time we started to choose a particular dish to prepare that we'd seen that day on one of the cooking shows. We'd make a day of it by heading to the market for fresh ingredients, and sometimes additional pots, pans, or utensils that we didn't have on-hand but would need to properly make the dish. We'd then return home and start creating.

At first, as you can well imagine, we had limited success. Those chefs really do make it easy, but in retrospect I must pay respect for the years they spent making it look easy. As time went on, however, our skills improved and we began to make more and more meals as a result.

As our children came along and became old enough to participate safely, we included them into what was quickly becoming our family tradition. The kids could pick a meal or dessert that interested them to help make and eat, and then it was off to the market.

Today, there are more cooking shows than ever, particularly with Food TV, PBS , and the Cooking Channel, and as a result my wife and I have become really good home cooks, and so have each of our children. We've made the most of our FiOS Triple Play bundle from Verizon. We watch all our favorite cooking shows and recording them on our DVR, we send email video cooking clips to our children through our high-speed internet connection, and use our digital home phone with unlimited nationwide calling to answer and sometimes ask cooking questions that just need real-time interaction.