Quote

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.

Growing up, my mom had a catering business. I used to help her pretty early on and loved doing it. My mom is an amazing cook, and she helped me cultivate a love for food. She taught me that food can be beautiful. We eat not just for survival, but we survive to eat. It's part of who I am.

Food has always been in my life. Being born in Ethiopia, where there was a lack of food, and then really cooking with my grandmother Helga in Sweden. And my grandmother Helga was a cook's cook.

Food was always important in my family, but I didn't think of it as a vocation until a later point in life.

My dad loves to cook. I'm half Thai, and growing up, that's all we ate in my house. My dad was very big on the idea that dinnertime and cooking time was also family time.

I started cooking from watching my mom. My mother was a really, really great cook.

I've always been a foodie. My grandmother got me hooked on cooking.

I was raised on T.V. dinners because in those days, they were considered a well-balanced meal. And when I was sick, my mother fed me beef-barley soup and peanut butter sandwiches. That's about it for childhood food memories.

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.

My mother was really young when she had me, so she was a horrible cook, but we lived with my grandmother, who was fantastic. We eventually got our own place, and my mother started learning to cook. But it was also the '70s, so she was very experimental, and, well - thank God we had a dog.