Hollywood's cutthroat acting scene can send even the strongest personalities running for the hills. That's precisely where aspiring actress Manouschka Guerrier ended up, combining her passion for acting with a hearty arsenal of Haitian-inspired recipes on the Food Network's "Private Chefs of Beverly Hills."

In Guerrier's family, Sunday dinners happened every night. "My grandmother and my mother cooked every single day," she says, describing meals heavy on rice and beans and incomplete without a meat of some sort. "The older I got, the more I started resenting having to eat rice and beans all the time," she says, resentment that quickly faded when she got to L.A. 14 year ago and found few, if any, Haitian restaurants to choose from.

Bringing the comforts of home -- Miami, Florida -- to her new digs on the West Coast would become Guerrier's primary goal, lending itself to a blog where Food Network...