When I arrived in Canada in 1975, I found ready employment in commercial kitchens, both restaurants and hotels, and began to specialize in large-scale, production cooking. I received my chef papers from Niagara College in 1986 from their culinary arts division and from that time took a number of chef positions in the Toronto area.
The beginnings of my cooking career were in Boston Beach, Jamaica, where I was born. When I was 10 years old, I became the man of the house and was charged with performing the cooking chores, along with my grandmother, for the entire family. This included my three younger siblings and two cousins. A frequent cooking style for us was called “pit slow cooking”. Using wood for fuel, we dug deep holes in the sand, and cooked in this manner. As it turns out, this was essentially the same approach as the pit barbecue style of the American South.
