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There is nothing more satisfying to me than seeing people who eat my food have smiles on their faces. It makes the experience special.
As a chef and avid traveler, meeting new people and sharing a meal with the intent to learn more about their culture is important to me.
Most Mexican restaurants serve fake, heavy versions of my home country's cuisine. But real Mexican food is full of brilliant, fresh flavors.
I have pictures with Morimoto where I'm all embarrassed and he's so serious, it took me 30 minutes to get up the courage to introduce myself.
I think it's important to educate kids about food and let them help a little with the cooking and cleaning. That interaction is really important.
My boys will not only respect and admire women and see them as their equals, but they will also see them as sources of inspiration and knowledge.
For me, candlelit is the only way to have a dinner. There are always candles at my table. And I like to have Luis Miguel playing in the background.
Supermarket cherry tomatoes do serve a purpose, but the flavor is vastly different than those from your own garden. Same for broccoli and snap peas.
I surround myself with people that are supportive of our insane family dynamic, and I savor every minute of every day I have at home with my family.
We didn't grow up with processed foods at all. I mean, I am not a nutritionist. I make enchiladas for a living, so that disclaimer needs to be there.
It's what makes me the happiest - to make beautiful things for the people I love, and to fill my home with love and laughter and music and food and people.
I'm a purist when it comes to certain foods, and al pastor tacos (known as adobada tacos to us in Tijuana) is one of those foods. I lived off them - literally.
I kind of love the idea of teaching our kids that you don't have to follow the rules to be incredibly successful and live in harmony and have a wonderful life.
Growing up, my mom was a stay-at-home mom. I knew that her entire world revolved around us, and she relished being involved in every school project and every craft.
The combination of charred poblanos and corn is a classic one in Mexico and once added to a rich, creamy dressing and soft potatoes, it makes for the perfect summer side.
When I heard that Capital One was fostering a conversation about natural connections that exist among all of us, bridged through our travels - I knew I had to get involved.
My job is to show people that true Mexican cheese is not neon yellow cheese. We don't eat tacos all day long and we don't eat burritos stuffed with everything in the kitchen sink.
San Diego, in fact, is one of the hardest places to sell Mexican food. You just cross the border into Tijuana and they have better food that's more authentic and for half the price.
My aunt was a chef and she inspired me deeply so she was a huge motivator but more than anything it was a quest for independence and freedom that lead me to an L.A. Culinary School.
I'm usually pretty good about knowing which of my social media posts will create more excitement, but every once in a while I'll post something and be totally surprised at the response.
I do the best I can to remind my family as often as possible that I love them more than life itself, and to let them know that every step I take is with them in the very front of my mind.
All of my dishes kind of have the same thing going on - I'm always going to give you the same things that I grew up with or that my mom used to make. I'm not going to use nitrogen in my tacos.
In Tijuana, we have cuisine from every region of Mexico and cooks from all over cooking in all of the restaurants, so there is a huge influence from sources like the Yucatan, Oaxaca and Puebla.
In Tijuana, because there's such a mix and match of people and regions and we're a newer city and everyone comes from some place else, I think we're just given permission to play with our food.
Escamoles have a cottage cheese-like consistency and have a buttery yet slightly nutty flavor. They are usually served sauteed with butter, garlic, and scallions for making soft corn tortilla tacos.
I love warm salads with bacon and spinach. I love the varieties of the nicoise that show up on so many menus. I love steak salads for their lusciousness and how the meat juices seep into the dressing.
We do two things almost every week - either grilled steaks marinated in herbs or roasted chicken. There's always a roasted vegetable, like Brussels sprouts or sweet potatoes or broccolini - whatever's in season.
I didn't realize I was living in a very unique situation until I became a culinary professional. For me, there was nothing out of the ordinary about spending half my day in Mexico, and the other half in California.
Simplicity is key. Some people like really high-tech kitchens, where you have warming drawers and ice makers and storage for a million different things. Honestly, for me, I need an oven, a stove top, a fridge and a sink.
My goal and my mission is to cook the home-style food that I grew up with - simple, straightforward, inexpensive and homemade tortillas. Nothing fancy and no cream based sauces - just tomatoes & chiles and nothing pre-processed.
My decisions are motivated by my life, my values, and what I stand for, not what I can gain financially from it. This has weeded out the opportunities that I don't care about and has brought on a lot of new opportunities that mean everything to me.
My half-breed culture informs everything I do but I'm not thinking about it. I'm just doing it. Not until very late in my career did I realize that I was so fortunate to just live with this profound pride in being half Mexican without being attacked for it.
I had a lot of female role models around me as a kid, but my aunt Marcela Rodriguez was the strongest. When she was only 26, she opened Artes Culinarias Internacionales, one of the first culinary schools in Baja. She started with six students and built up to 800.
There's a design book I got years ago that had a statue of a dog with a bunch of hats on it, and I just obsessively fell in love with it. For years I searched for that dog. One day I walked into an antique shop in La Jolla and I found a white dog that I could put hats on!
My former assistant used to tell me I have a problem with cushions and she was totally right. The reason is because I'm constantly rearranging things in my house. And if I can't move a whole piece of furniture, the easiest thing to rearrange is cushions. I like to keep things fresh.
The more kids are involved, the more likely they are to eat the food. Getting them involved gets them excited, and kids are much more likely to try something that they were involved in the process of creating because it gives them a sense of accomplishment - kids always love approval.
We're a family with a pretty light sense of humor but, still, on the anniversary of my mom's passing we don't feel like getting 'colorful' and remembering her favorite foods. Every March 5th, the anniversary of her passing, we go to church and are sad for pretty much the rest of the day.
On the 'Today' show, I feel comfortable because I get to interact with people. I love that interaction. I love hearing other people's stories. I would much rather have that human interaction so it feels like a real conversion than just standing there and demonstrating things to the camera.
One summer, when I was on break from architecture school in Tijuana, my aunt gave me a summer job cleaning up and peeling garlic, and I got to see her in her element. She was so passionate and such a good teacher, I decided to quit architecture school and go to culinary school in Los Angeles.
I've been really fortunate and I've just tried to focus on the work and getting people to see Mexico, its food and its culture in a slightly different light. It's tricky with Mexican food because a lot of our recipes are so deeply rooted in tradition and Mexican history. That's a heavy responsibility!
Those of us that were raised in Tijuana have so much access to San Diego. I was crossing the border every day when I was a kid, and that back and forth has a huge influence on the cuisine. So the U.S. is coming down to Tijuana, Tijuana is going to San Diego. There's this great blending, a great exchange.
Growing up in Mexico, I have many fond memories of not only celebrating posadas with my family, but also of the time spent together menu planning and prepping for decoration and entertaining activities. A lot of work goes into celebrating these traditions, but that doesn't mean they have to cost a lot too.
I was a contestant on 'The Apprentice: Martha Stewart' and more than her telling me I learned from her that authenticity is key. She had a huge issue with a contestant using the phrase 'fake it 'til you make it' and fired her that same episode. She taught me that you can't fake being a master of your craft.
Growing up, everybody would cross the border, even to just do grocery shopping. A lot of traditional American foods stuck with my parents and became part of my upbringing. This all had to do with the proximity to the border. We were an absolute mix of classic Americana, traditional Mexican, and Baja cuisine.
There's a particular quality that those of us who live on the border share; we can switch from being Mexican to being American in an instant just by scanning our surroundings. Not everybody has this superpower; it takes a very specific kind of upbringing to instill a deep pride in two very different cultures.
Growing up, I didn't realize how unique it was to live on the border of the United States and Mexico. It wasn't until I started doing interviews with the press that I actually began to appreciate just how cool it was that I would cross the international border every single day from Tijuana into San Diego to go to school.
People ask me all the time, 'What do you do for Cinco de Mayo?' And my honest answer is always, 'When I was growing up in Mexico, nothing. Really, nothing. It was a school day. It was totally normal.' But when I grew up and started going to San Diego and started drinking margaritas, that's when Cinco de Mayo celebrations started for me.
We'll do frozen pizzas and then I'll get arugula from the garden and do a fresh salad over the top with shaved Parmesan. Or we'll buy a rotisserie chicken already made, and then we'll make tacos and a fresh salsa and we'll grill some vegetables to accompany it. We definitely try to make it a little bit homemade if it's not completely homemade.