After a much needed holiday, I’m back in Business.
Last week I started  the 2010 Pan-Latino cooking series at IQliving and at the LCBO.
Happy to report the two first classes were sold out.
It’s great to see how much interest on Latin cuisine has grown no just in Toronto, but all over Canada as well.
It has been [...]

I met Mary Luz Mejia last year when she and I were asked to judge some dishes in a Latino culinary competition. Mary Luz is a Colombian-Canadian food journalist and Gemini-nominated TV writer, producer and director. One of her impressive credits is At the Table With ….. Each episode is a biography of a  well-known [...]

Like food, peliculas are an entrance into understanding a culture. Naturally, as part of how I celebrate Latino culture through food, I’m excited about today’s opening of the 6th annual Toronto International Latin Film Festival, at the Royal Theater on College Street.

With films showing the diaspora of the Spanish language, the festival reveals an unlikely [...]

The launch of this year’s award ceremonies for the Ten Most Influential Hispanic Canadians kicked off last week at the Toronto Stock Exchange. The awards are the brainchild of Mauricio Ospina, champion of our Latino businesses and entrepreneurs, creator of the online magazine Hispanic Business

With Ospina: champion of Latino accomplishment in Canada
It’s time to [...]

Chayote was a major part of what I decided to serve at Feast of Fields this year. It’s a relatively unknown vegetable if you’re not Latino, Caribbean or an adventurous explorer of world foods.
Finding organic chayote was a challenge, but luckily Whole Foods had some that was naturally grown, which means it wont be long [...]

Join me on July 29 from 6:30 to 8:30 pm, at the Summerhill LCBO for the “Sabor de California” festival.

I am going to celebrate with a class to showcase the Mexican influences on the regional flavours of California cuisine.
Our foodie-road trip and what we’re making…..
First stop: Gilroy, the garlic capital of the world and the [...]

One of my favourite places in Kensington Market is Segovia Meat Market [aka Casa del Chorizo], where I have been buying my chorizo for years.
Leonardo Segovia is the proprietor and a friend, and I like to think of him as the Chorizo King because he runs the first Latino butcher shop in Canada, makes 18 [...]

Rosa Maria Tortorici and I are ecstatic to report that our collaborative project was a huge success.
Together, we devised a way to pull together a Spanish language lesson — with a nod to Rosa’s Living Spanish language school — while simultaneously conducting a Latino cooking class, which was my contribution.

We sold out to a very [...]

I’m really excited and honoured, and humbled, too.
The LCBO has picked me as their Featured Chef for the 2008 Winter Season Cooking Education Program.
This is my second Latin Fever Series for the LCBO, and the first time in seven years that a South American chef has been chosen to be Featured Chef.
It’s also a testament [...]

I’ve teamed up with my friend Rosa Maria Tortorici, who runs Living Spanish, a unique Spanish school, where she takes her students outside the classroom and to cafés, to the market or into her home to cook them a meal, all in Spanish. This way, she says, real life inspires their language learning and not [...]