As a child, I was raised with my grandmother, alongside all my cousins, and the kitchen was always full.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My mother's kitchen was built to be the focal point of our house. I got into the kitchen often as a child.
I shared a room with my parents until I was 7, and I lived with my uncles and aunts and my cousins and my grandfather... so the house was always full of people.
Everybody in my family cooks, so growing up and being around it... if I was going to spend time with everybody, it was helping them in the kitchen.
My grandmother was a typical farm-family mother. She would regularly prepare dinner for thirty people, and that meant something was always cooking in the kitchen. All of my grandmother's recipes went back to her grandmother.
As I was growing up, all meals, including breakfast, were family occasions, and you all sat down to eat together - and you had to finish everything as well.
Our house was always full of grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins.
When I was growing up, my mother worked, and in the evenings, the whole family would sit around the dinner table and recount the day.
I was a little, uh, incorrigible as a kid, so the kitchen was a good place to give me structure and balance. It taught me hard work, but then I grew to love it.
Growing up, I cooked in the house, and when I cooked, everyone would sit down and eat, and it was just kind of the way I connected with my family.
I grew up in the kitchen, mostly with my grandfather, my mother and my aunt Raffy.