s a young boy, Grandma Aida and Grandma Raquel would call me into the kitchen, hand me a can of beans, and tell me to get to work! Like most Hispanic families, we were going to make tostones, a delicious, traditional treat. My cousins and I would use the bottom of a can to press 15 or 20 plantains in order to have enough for the entire family to sit down and enjoy dinner together. Tostones are so irresistibly good that my aunts and uncles would sneak into the kitchen to steal them before they ever hit the dinner table. All that work, and we almost never had any left to accompany our dinner! Pressing stuffed tostones was difficult and time consuming, we simply could not keep up with the demand!

Today, I have three children of my own. Like me, they love stuffed tostones and wished we could have them more often - not just at birthdays and holiday celebrations. With all of the technologies in the world today, I realized that it was totally absurd that we were still using a can, brown paper bag, or a cup to press tostones one at a time. And so, in November of 2002 I invented the first dual-purpose tostonera. One side made a flat chip, the other side, a cup. A few months later, I invited some friends over for a birthday party and we enjoyed stuffed tostones with crab and shrimp. What a difference my tostonera made! Everyone got enough to eat. Everyone could eat at the same time.