I have had a passion for food and cooking as long as I can remember. When I was 13 years old I would spend hours watching cooking shows like “Chopped” with my grandmother. Both of my grandmothers are great cooks and I remember always wanting to be able to cook like them. You can see a picture of me cooking at my late aunts apartment from when I was young.

Despite not having any Latin American heritage, Latin American food, more specifically, Mexican food has always been my favorite to eat and cook. The local Mexican restaurant “Plaza Azteca” was where my family would spend all birthdays for my parents, my brother, and I. On the left you can see Birria tacos that I cooked in 2022. It was a very long process but completely worth the wait.

Growing up I never liked hamburgers or ground beef at all for that matter. The closest thing that I would eat to ground beef was a meatball. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I began to eat burgers at all. Even then I was never crazy about thick burgers. When I discovered how great thin, smash burgers are and just how easy they were to make, my burger consumption changed forever. The hardest part about the burger in this picture was caramelizing the onions as that takes some patience.