"I am not food correct," says Eddie Hernandez, chef and author of "Turnip Greens & Tortillas"

I’m a born again Southern boy.

I live in a city where I can listen to a bluegrass band on one night, and on another night I can go hear the blues. During football season I cheer for my two home teams — the UGA Bulldogs and the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets — except when they play each other, and then I am a Tech fan all the way.

When I have a few days off, one of my favorite things to do is take a long, slow drive on the back roads of rural Georgia, along the bayous of Louisiana, or through the mountains of Tennessee. Wherever I go, I stop at every little café and roadside stand I can to try the fried chicken, the barbecue, the boudin sausage, or whatever it is the locals eat. As I taste, I start to get ideas about how I would recreate them — my way. In Nashville I try the famous hot fried chicken at a place called Hattie B’s and think how it would taste cut into strips and wrapped in a tortilla together with lime and jalapeño mayonnaise and shredded lettuce to cool the spice.

So what if it doesn’t work out? I will try it again until I get it right, or I will move on to the next thing. That is how I educate myself. I am not afraid to fail. Since I was a boy, I have always loved to figure out how to take things apart and put them back together — whether it was a truck engine or a tamale.

I have no family photographs to show because my family didn’t own a camera. We didn’t keep scrapbooks. I only have my cooking to trigger the memories. I was born in Monterrey, Mexico, one of the largest cities in the country. It lies in the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental about 115 miles from the Texas border. We lived in a working-class neighborhood of cement-block houses occupied by big families — up to thirty people. Every morning as we kids walked to school — we walked pretty much everywhere — there would be five, ten, fifteen moms out sweeping the streets, criticizing our wardrobes.

“Why are you wearing that shirt?” “I hope you changed your socks!”

My mother fed our family home-cooked food every day. We had lunch between twelve and one, and dinner between six and seven. Always. If you weren’t there, you would either have to heat your meal up yourself, if there was anything left, or go hungry. The other kids and I did our share of arguing and fighting, but never at the table. That was our time to sit down together in peace.Everything we ate was fresh. No one had gardens in my neighborhood, other than maybe some herbs or chiles in pots, because it was the big city and there wasn’t space. Instead the mothers went to the market every day. They bought what looked good to them and was a good price.

Our markets were nothing like the mainstream supermarkets in the U.S. They were more like open-air farmers’ markets with butcher shops, bakeries, and stalls filled with tomatoes, fresh corn, avocados, peppers, cabbages, zucchini, mangoes — you name it. Living in a climate that rarely dips below 70 degrees, even in winter, we were used to having access to a huge assortment of fresh produce year-round. Most people didn’t have refrigerators in their homes, and in poor rural areas, that’s often still the case. Electronics had to be imported and were very expensive. My family was fortunate enough to have those appliances. We even had a blender! But we still shopped daily. It was our way of life.

My dad was a mechanic. He worked on a steam engine in the railyard, and I watched him with fascination. He wore suits every day to work and came home covered in diesel oil, looking like he just crawled out of the earth. After he showered, he would put on a fresh suit and go out looking like a million bucks. I was nine when he died.

I lived with my mother and grandmother, neither of whom had a husband. Then my stepfather, Leonardo, came into the picture. And when he and my mother had kids — five of them — I couldn’t help feeling neglected. I started to make my own course in life.

My mother’s brother was like a father figure to me. Uncle José taught me mechanical skills like welding, bolting, and painting cars. He also taught me a lot about food. We ate things no one would eat but us — like goats’ brains. He would buy whole pine nuts for us to crack and eat.

He never bought them shelled because he thought it was more fun to crack them ourselves. When I got older, we liked to drink and listen to music together. But it was my grandmother who gave me the desire to learn to cook. Her name was Consuela, but everybody called her Chelo. She was a strong-willed entrepreneur who owned seven different bars and convenience stores around Monterrey. One place was three doors down from where we lived. It didn’t have a name. Everyone just knew it as Chelo’s place. As a kid I hung out there.Nobody messed with Chelo.

She was a big woman, at least 5 foot 8, with blond hair and blue eyes. Her voice could make grown men run. We used to joke that she’d never die because neither God nor the devil would take her. She knew how to handle all kinds of situations. But whenever she raised her voice to me, I raised mine back. I think she liked that. We respected each other.

I’m not going to say Chelo was a chef, because back then there was no such thing as a chef. Everybody just cooked. Guys who would go to her pub for a beer liked the fact that they could get a good meal and free homemade snacks there. She was big on fresh food, and she never made the same things two days in a row. I loved watching Chelo cook things that I had never seen anyone else make. Pickled pork skin was one of my favorites.

In Mexico it’s a good bar food and a side dish for tacos. I would ask her to make some just for me. But she would say, “If you want to eat it, then learn how to make it yourself, because I’m not going to be here one day and who is going to cook it for you?” And so I learned, and eventually became pretty good at it. I taught myself to drive a truck when I was twelve, and Chelo would send me to the market to pick up groceries.

I got my first job delivering newspapers when I was thirteen, and when I was fifteen, I bought a car and opened a torta stand on the street. I made a pot of carnitas — pork meat simmered in oil until tender — and served it on bread three different ways: with cold salsa made with tomatoes and chiles; with cooked salsa; and plain, with just some chopped avocado. It looked fancy but it was as simple as could be.