Welcome to our kitchen! Inquiring Chef began in 2010 as a destination for healthyish dinner recipes, easy desserts, and achievable meal prep. These days it’s the destination for curious home cooks.
The recipes on this site are the original work of professional meal planner, cooking teacher, and cookbook author, Jess Smith.
This site was created during the five years that Jess and Frank (the partnership in life and work behind Inquiring Chef) lived in Bangkok, Thailand. Many new readers (hi!) find us through our Thai recipes.
This website celebrates healthyish, homemade food for real life – vegetable-forward dinners, nutritious breakfasts, and easy desserts. All of our recipes go through a rigorous testing process in our home kitchen, are perfected by a professional recipe tester, and are made by a small group of volunteers before we publish them on the pages of this website.
These days, Jess, Frank, and their three daughters live in Lyon, France. If you’d like to learn more about our life in France and how we made this move happen, join Jess on Substack at Postcards from France.
Jess – Recipe Developer & Photographer
Jess spent nearly a decade as Chief Recipe Developer for the award-winning meal planning app Cook Smarts where her healthyish approach to cooking reached thousands of home cooks. Jess has a Master’s Degree in Education Policy and spent the early part of her career working in education. She loves putting her degree to use while teaching kids at Inquiring Chef Academy.
Jess’s recipes have been featured in popular online publications like Parade, Hallmark, Honest Cooking, Raddish Kids, Livestrong, Self, Yahoo, NBC, HuffPost, Punchkfork, and She Knows.
Her first cookbook Start with a Vegetable is an Amazon best seller.
On any given day, you can likely find Jess in the kitchen baking five slightly different versions of vegan chocolate cupcakes while stirring a batch of ramen and cooking curried chickpeas in the Instant Pot. It’s a delicious job.
Contact Jess at jess [at] inquiringchef.com.
Frank – Site Strategist & Chief Mixologist
Frank is a classic INFP, jack-of-all-trades, and has been traveling the world on his stomach for three decades. He worked for Peace Corps in Eastern Europe and Asia.
After getting an MBA in Spain, his love of blogging led him to corporate marketing in 2016 where managed content and social media for a major brand.
In 2026 Frank launched Smith & Scale where he helps creators think, operate, and grow like the world’s best brands. If you are a content creator interested in growth, join our community of creators at The Scale Collective.
Frank can likely be found creating elaborate spreadsheets to keep our 1000+ recipes organized and shaking up our favorite cocktails at the end of long recipe testing days. He also manages our YouTube channel.
Contact Frank at frank [at] inquiringchef.com.
