One day I was hitch hiking to work, through the French country side, and yes offcourse it was snowing, to a highly regarded restaurant where young men came from all over the world to work. The next evening I was standing in shorts and a t shirt, in 30 plus degrees, after dark, beside a speaker wall which was blaring out heavy base reggae music. I was on a beach in front of a rum shack drinking moonshine punch and being wished merry Christmas by a bunch of very happy men of the Rastafarian faith.

I had taken a job on a small island in the South Eastern Caribbean called Nevis, of the Federation of St Kitts and Nevis, which lay between Montserrat, to the south and Anguilla to the north.

What a culture shock. I realised that this experience was going to be different when I saw the one shack airport, where I, and my new good friend, the pilot had just landed in a four seater plane, which belonged to a local airline called Nevis Express, this airline was later to become known to us as Nervous Express. As I pulled away in my taxi I saw a mechanic working on a plane with a spanner in one hand and a beer in the other.

My time in Nevis was to be a very steep learning curve in many aspects, but I did not realise that I would have to learn a new language, the Nevision dialect, it took me the best part of six months to grasp a basic understanding of it. The island is only about 40 sq miles in size and has a population of around 10 000. The capital city is Charlestown, which lies on the Western side, but the people that live over on the Atlantic side or in the country, as the locals call it, actually had a different accent or twang to their speech.

It was a very busy and very hot kitchen; this is where I started to wear a t shirt under my chefs jacket. I found that if I did not have this extra layer of insulation then my jacket would soak through with perspiration very quickly and it would cling annoyingly to my skin, also the radiant heat coming off the stoves would heat the sweat and make you very uncomfortable. When you walked into a cool room, steam would bellow off your body and it was very easy to catch a cold this way. My chefs jacket was always soaked through by the end of service. One of my colleagues was a Canadian sous chef and he was actually able to wring out sweat from his apron after a normal service.

The kitchen management team were all expatriates from various parts of the world and local women made up the 60 or so cooks that worked in the various kitchens of the hotel. Men did not work in the kitchen; they worked in the field as the called it, which just meant outside, but generally not on the kitchen or in housekeeping. It is easy to see in many cultural aspects that it was not very long ago that these people were slaves, belonging to wealthy plantation owners.

The locals are also very proud and religious people, to them, I was just the next young punk sous chef who would be gone when his two year contract was up, and one of my favourite, of the many and interesting remarks made to me, was something along the lines of ‘yo na me boss, jesus me boss’. You can’t really argue with that.

There were a few Australians that worked in the resort and the expatriate community was extremely small. We all socialised together and I remember one particular Australia day when myself and a couple of other aussies as well as the American golf and tennis pros went on a bit of a pub crawl, or more accurately, rum shack crawl, we ended up in a bar in Charlestown that night, playing drinking games with the local Irish catholic missionary, Farther George, we thought we could drink.

Fresh produce was actually very difficult to get on Nevis, especially in the quantities that the hotel needed. We received a container once a week from Miami for the hotel, but in the local supermarket, pickings were slim. Ironically the shelves were full of Dom Perignon and other non perishable luxury items, for the rich American villa owners on the island. A bottle of Stolley was actually cheaper than a bottle of fresh orange juice. This made for interesting ratios when you ordered a mixed drink at a local bar. All the meat and fish at the local market was frozen and of poor quality. I like to say that for two years I lived on frozen chicken and rice and peas.

Hurricane George hit in 1998 and all but destroyed the $70 mill resort, I was on landscape duty for over a month. At that time, in an unrelated accident, I severely cut on my arms from falling broken glass. I severed the tendons in one arm and got 37 stitches, with no anaesthetic, because there was no doctor around at the time, in the other arm. The hospital had chickens and goats running around in it so the hotel manager thought that he had better fly me off to Puerto Rico to have the surgery on my tendons checked out. It turns out that the medical team in Nevis had done a reasonable job, although painful. But as far as I was concerned it was all worth it, I had an unforgettable three days and four nights of sushi and American style steak houses, all on the hotels account. Occasionally I get a craving for the old rice and peas with some jerk seasoning, but please no frozen chicken ever again. Here is a recipe for Jerk chicken with Carribbean style rice and peas, each island, like their rum punch, have their own versions of this, but they are all good

RICE AND PEAS
Serves: 4
1 medium sized can red kidney beans
1 can coconut milk
2 cups of rice
1 small onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
1/4 teaspoon dried thyme
1 table spoon vegetable oil
1 scotch bonnet pepper (whole, do not chop up)
water

Drain the liquid from the can of beans into a measuring cup and add the can of coconut milk and enough water to make four cups of liquid. Place liquids in a pot with beans, onions, garlic, thyme and oil, bring to a boil. Add rice and stir for a minute. Reduce heat to Medium-Low. Place scotch bonnet pepper on top of liquid and cover tightly for 30 minutes or until rice is cooked. Remove scotch bonnet pepper before serving.

This recipes can also be made using other peas.


JERK CHICKEN
2 tablespoons ground thyme
1 tablespoon ground rosemary
1 tablespoon ground allspice
1 tablespoon ground ginger
1 ½ tablespoons sea salt
1 ½ teaspoons onion powder
1 ½ teaspoons black pepper
1 ½ teaspoons ground cinnamon
¾ teaspoon ground nutmeg
¾ teaspoon garlic powder
¾ teaspoon paprika
2 teaspoons ground scotch bonnet peppers (habanero)
12 bay leaves(finely crumbled)
1/3 cup sugar
2kg chickens (pieces, wings, halves, whatever)
1 lime, juice of
¼ cupolive oil

Combine all but chicken, lime juice and oil in mixing bowl and whisk to mix well. Whisk together lime juice and olive oil. Rub chicken well with lime/oil mix.Do not marinate. Coat chicken with dry seasoning/spice mixture.The idea here is to get as much as possible to stick to the chicken.We store our seasoning in a leftover spice container with large sprinkle holes and use that to season.This is not a rub, so it should not be applied in rub fashion. Refrigerate 1-3 hours, then remove from refrigerator and allow to come to near room temperature. Prepare grill or bbq for direct/indirect roasting. Grill chicken over hot direct fire. Don’t worry about the black, it’s supposed to be there. In fact, 30-40% of the skin should end up black, but it will not be bitter. Once seared, remove to the indirect heat area of the grill and roast to 165* internal temperature. One quick dance across the direct heat before serving will help crisp it a bit. Serve with plenty of napkins.