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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.

After my father died when I was seven and my mother entered into an abusive relationship, I shuffled between houses - staying with friends, families from church, and relying on the kindness of teachers and people throughout my community to help me grow up essentially without parents.

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.

Growing up in high school, I wasn't hanging out with friends every day or on the weekends. Doing normal high school kid things was something I was willing to give up.

You know, my parents had a restaurant. And I left home, actually, in 1949, when I was 13 years old, to go into apprenticeship. And actually when I left home, home was a restaurant - like I said, my mother was a chef. So I can't remember any time in my life, from age 5, 6, that I wasn't in a kitchen.

I really didn't have an interest in being in the kitchen until after I was married, when I was 18. It didn't take me long to realize that Mama was not going to show up at my house every day and cook.

I left school when I was 14 to work in kitchens.

All I did was go to school and play golf. I didn't have much of a social life.

Growing up, I had a front row seat to seeing two people work really hard. My dad scrubbed toilets at a private Catholic school for a while, and that was to help me get through school.