A. Steamed rice

Q. How did you learn how to cook?

A. I was taught how to cook by my mother, paternal grandmother and aunt, Chinese-Jamaican friends, and employees in our family-owned business in Morant Bay, Jamaica. I also took culinary arts in high school.

Q. What's your favorite food?

A. I enjoy seafood dishes.

Q. Where do you like to dine?

A. Here in Durham, I love Pao Lim Bistro. In Jamaica, I love to dine at Devon House and the roadside huts along Mt. Diablo.

Q. Your biggest kitchen disaster?

A. I forgot that I'd already added salt to rice and beans, and I added more. However, a secret I learned was to add a potato because it absorbed the salt, so it really didn't end up as such a disaster, after all.

Q. What's the strangest thing you've ever made?

A. When I lived in New York and supported my four children and money was tight, I'd come home every evening and just put together things left over from my refrigerator. I'd make a roast beef on Sunday, then on the following days I'd stir fry chicken and add the beef with vegetables. I don't know if you can consider these dishes strange, because I think the kids enjoyed them and they didn't know what to expect from one night to the next.

Q. What's the wackiest thing in your refrigerator?

A. Frozen scotch bonnet peppers and smoked herring.

Q. What's your comfort food?

A. Ox tails with lima beans and curry goat.

Q. What's your most ambitious dish?

A. I can't name one particular dish. My most challenging cooking experience ... was when I was asked by Edward Seaga (former Jamaican prime minister), who was my deceased brother's dear friend, to prepare a dinner for [former prime minister] Sir Alexander Bustamante. I understood he loved meatballs, so I made him sweet and sour meatballs and a special dinner for the dignitary guests -- the traditional Jamaican-style roast beef, rice and peas, potato salad, stir-fried vegetables, etc.

Q. What's your funniest kitchen story?

A. My eldest daughter Tracey had recently vowed to be a vegetarian. One particular evening I had prepared roast pork -- the kind with the cracking skin, which I had seasoned and marinated with Jamaican jerk the night before. Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, my son arrived home after being out with friends and turned on the kitchen light for a late-night snack. He heard rustling and sought out the noise under the dining table to discover none other than my daughter, Tracey, stuffing herself with that very pork. We all had a good laugh. ... Needless to say, she is no longer a vegetarian.