From KCRW, I'm Evan Klyman and this is good food.

Jamaica is a cooking culture.

You know, most of what we ate was something that we prepared inside the home.

You know, for instance, if we're going to make certain treats, like if rice and peas,

which one of the main ingredient in rice and peas is actually the coconut milk.

So we would actually get fresh coconut and we'll have to process it by grating the coconut and a very fine grater, which is very sharp.

We'll grate it, we'll juice it, and we use the fresh coconut milk to make a stock

that will cook our peas in to then cook our rice.

You know, we treated everything as a process.

Jamaica.

The images on our heads are nearly always accompanied by their own soundtrack when we hear

the name of the Caribbean island.

Chef Andre Fowles wants to make your mouth start to water when you hear the name Jamaica, too.

It's where he was raised by his grandmother and where he developed his love of food and flavor.

Andre champions the dishes and recipes from the streets of Kingston to your home kitchen with his debut cookbook, My Jamaican Table.

Hi. Hi, thank you so much for having me. That's a, that's a wonderful intro. Thank you so much. Oh, good. Andre, you write that you discovered food

as a bridge to hope, which is such a beautiful thing to say. Can you share your early experiences of growing up in Kingston and the strong women in your life and how food kind of brightened and not so easy road?

Yeah, sure.

So I grew up with my mom, you know, single mom of four, And we grew up downtown Kingston, which, you know,

we had our own struggles, you know, because my mom, she was more of someone that's hustles

to put food on the table. So she would have her own cook shop. She will have different ways of

making money so she can support her family. And of course, her mother,

...