Welcome to our kitchen! Inquiring Chef began in 2010 as a resource for vegetable-forward recipes, approachable meal plans, and achievable meal prep.
The recipes you will find here are the original work of professional meal planner, cooking teacher, and best-selling cookbook author, Jess Smith.
This site was founded 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 or our culinary camps. We now live in Kansas City with our three daughters who are our best, and most demanding, taste-testers.
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 are recipes you can feel great about serving the people around your table (even if, as our children often do, they refuse to eat the broccoli in those saucy noodles).
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 Hallmark in 2016 where manages content and social media. Frank manages overall site and content strategy for Inquiring Chef and works behind the scenes as official taste-tester and drink-pairing expert.
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.
Contact Frank at frank [at] inquiringchef.com.
