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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.

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.

My mother always cooked, every day, proper food. We didn't have fast food. It was probably pretty much meat and two veg, but as time went on and new things came into the culture, she embraced all of that. I grew up with mealtimes and sitting around the table with proper cooking and eating.

I remember being a young boy in Spain and watching my parents cook. We didn't go to a lot of restaurants because we didn't always have the money, so cooking at home was just what we did.

I had a great childhood, a very close-knit family. We were all overweight, and we had good times eating together, I imagine.

My love for cooking began when I was young. Because my parents were in the army, they were both really busy. A lot of times I'd have to cook for the family; I'd rotate with my siblings. It started out as a chore, but as I got older, my mom started to see that I was really good at it. I became her sous chef.

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.

I think I was immediately fed, so food became a very important part of my life.

Growing up, dinner was when we would sit down, the whole family, and we would talk about our days and just create memories with one another. Now some of my favorite memories are eating and making food with my son.