Chef Maricel Presilla hopes to bring to food lovers a perfect blend of the diverse cuisine cultures of the world in her new cookbook "Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America."

After owning two restaurants and compiling innumerable cookbooks, Chef Maricel Presilla released the newest of her works "Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America" hoping to give cooks and food lovers a perfect blend of the diverse cuisine cultures of the world.

"It's my whole life," she tells Morning Edition host David Greene. "There are recipes there of my childhood, things that I remember my family, my aunts doing. But also things that I learned as I started to travel Latin America."

To write her book, Presilla reveals that she had to do a lot of traveling in Latin America. She visited housewives and regular home cooks. She also visited street vendors to learn their secrets of cooking and coming up with new and unique recipes. The cook turned author revealed that she learnt a lot from them an found that the world of cuisines is undergoing a constant change with each passing day and every new generation.

"There's creativity and there's new classics being created every day," she says. And in the U.S., "all Latin cultures are coming together," she notes. "It's really unavoidable that sooner or later you're going to start learning from your neighbor."

Presilla also notes that different cuisines are actually not all that different from each other and are connected to each other in some way or the other.

"If you look at the sofrito, the cooking sauce that is the foundation of our cooking, well, the woman from Cartagena gets a grater, and she grates the onions. While in Cuba, we chop everything finely. And in Puerto Rico, well, she would put everything in a blender," she says. "But in the end, we all have the same elements of culture. If you look at the origin of the majority of these things...you realize that they all go back to medieval Spain. It's a common DNA."