A Quote by Aaron Sanchez
My mother and my grandmother are pioneers of Mexican cuisine in this country, so I grew up in the kitchen. My mom, Zarela Martinez, was by far my biggest influence and inspiration - and toughest critic.
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I was always a person on my mother's hip in the kitchen. My mom really wanted her kids at her side as much as possible, and she worked in restaurants for over fifty years. And my grandfather had ten children, and he grew and prepared most of the food. My grandmother, on my mother's side, was the family seamstress and the baker. So my mom, the eldest child, was always in the kitchen with my grandpa and I was always in the production and restaurant kitchens and our own kitchen with my mom. And it's just something that has always spoken to me.
I go back five generations in Jamaica. My dad grew up in Port Royal, and my mom grew up in Kingston. My family is from the country like West Moreland and also in Manchester. I've been there countless times. As far as cuisine, there's not really much that comes out of Jamaica that's on a plate that I don't like.
Most Mexican restaurants serve fake, heavy versions of my home country's cuisine. But real Mexican food is full of brilliant, fresh flavors.
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 mom is my biggest inspiration by far. She inspires me on a daily basis. I remember hearing her sing around the house, and I was like, 'Mom, you belong on TV. You're a superstar.'
I grew up hearing stories about my grandmother - my mother's mother - who used to go to villages in India in her little VW bug. My grandmother would take a bullhorn and make sure women in these villages knew how to access birth control.
Food is a passion because I basically grew up in a kitchen. My mother was a gourmet chef and I'm the youngest of five kids. We would always congregate in the kitchen.
All of these concoctions that we think are Mexican, are in no way reflective of the deep, incredibly old, complex and sophisticated deep regional cuisine of Mexico. Or the new modern Mexican cuisine, which has really been exploding over the last few years. I think we just have a completely misrepresented view of how good, how complex these flavors are. I think we could learn a lot more. It's a great cuisine that's really moving forward, faster than any other.
My mom had beautiful clothes. My mom is elegant; my mom is glamorous. But my mom is also really real, and I grew up with a mother who had babies crawling on her head and spitting up on her when she was wearing gorgeous, expensive things, and it was never an issue.
I grew up with all my cousins. The men worked, and the older women raised us - my mother, my aunt, my grandmother. My great-grandmother was the matriarch, and sometimes there were 30 of us.
That's not what I want my children to hear. That's not representative of the country that I want my children to grow up in. And so that actually I found far more upsetting as a mom, as a woman, as an American, and even as my mother's daughter than anything they said about my mom.
My entire family is from Palakkad, and my grandmother grew up in Kerala, as did my mom.
I grew up in East Los Angeles, which is the biggest population of Mexican-Americans in America. I was born and raised there.
I think my mother is my biggest influence. There are so many things I hate about her but at the same time I'm thankful for her. All I know is that when I'm a parent I want to be just like my mom. I can talk to my mom more than any of my friends could talk to their parents.
I barely saw my mother, and the mom I saw was often angry and unhappy. The mother I grew up with is not the mother I know now. It's not the mother she became after my father died, and that's been the greatest prize of my life.
I have never denied my background or my culture. I have taught my child to embrace her Mexican heritage, to love my first language, Spanish, to learn about Mexican history, music, folk art, food, and even the Mexican candy I grew up with.
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