About Me 
Hey there! I’m Jackie, and I grew up loving food. I’m that annoying friend who’s like, “Wait! Do not touch your heritage chicken egg yolk ravioli with fried spinach threads until I get a picture of it! What…? Oh, you’re not in it, don’t worry.” My first adult-free foray into a kitchen was a collaborative effort featuring my twelve-year old self and two other middle school friends, on an entirely overambitious black forest cake that involved layers, three different elements, and unknown ingredients that we definitely skipped. It came out looking like black goo, I’m pretty sure it was collapsing on one side, and it tasted decidedly, mysteriously, not like chocolate. My next two baking attempts, at lemon bars and chocolate meringue cookies, were praised by family members, but I do not remember them being tasty. The first successful baking endeavor that I can remember was Tollhouse chocolate chip cookies (oh, that good ole’ standby!), and from then, I’ve never looked back.
Now I live in Chicago with my husband James and our black cat Dorothy. Ever since moving to the Windy City about two years ago, I’ve presided over the largest, most spacious kitchen I’ve ever had, and it’s really allowed my cooking (and the number of kitchen gadgets I own) to flourish. I’m a public health researcher by day, but when 6 o’clock rolls around, I only speak in tablespoons, bunches, and sauté instructions. It’s my hope that with this blog, I can share my love of whole, fresh food, inspire more cooking, and show that, even when you’re short on time and high on hunger, weeknight cooking doesn’t always have to be a trial by fryer!
Obviously, I also love puns.
About Trial by Fryer
All of the recipes on this website (except for Sunday dinners and Desserts) are things I make on a weeknight, after getting home from a full time job.
Let’s break that down. I love cooking, and so I acknowledge that I’ll spend more time on it than the regular person would on a weeknight. But we all get stuck in ruts, we all run out of ideas when 6 o’clock is approaching and we’re starving. So, I hope to provide here forgiving, modifiable, non-fussy recipes that are utterly delicious and mostly foolproof. Because when I’m running low on inspiration, those are the things I’m looking for.
Here are my personal criteria for weeknight dinners, and these will be the kinds of recipes you’ll find on this site:
- The food must sound delicious. I’m obsessed with new and interesting flavor combinations, anything garlic, and all Asian fare. I’m Chinese and grew up watching my mother cook, so I make a lot of Chinese and other Asian dishes.
- The recipe must look forgiving. I give exact measurements in the recipes here, but I often eyeball quantities instead of measuring precisely, and I’m not the most careful cook during the week. I want food that, even when made a bit sloppily, even when overcooked or lacking some non-essential ingredient (obviously meatballs can’t be lacking in ground meat), still comes out tasty.
- The recipe must be fairly easily scalable. I considered a lot of names for this blog, and Better the Next Day was a close contender. I am a HUGE believer in leftovers. However, I realize that not everyone is. Thus, even though the written recipes will typically serve 4-6, they should be fairly easily scaled down or up, for large dinner parties.
- It must not take more than two hours to make, total, including all prep. This is controversial, and I realize that this is a lot of time on a weeknight for some. But my personal circumstances are: I don’t have children, I have a fairly regular 9-5, and I have a manageable commute. So if I come home straight from work I can usually get home by 6, and get dinner on the table by 8. I enjoy these two hours, and so that’s an acceptable upper limit to me. To give a sense of how much work a recipe will be, however, I give every recipe a Fuss Factor and approximate cooking, prep, and total start-to-end times.
On the other hand, Sunday Dinners are just that – things I make on Sundays (or Saturdays), when I have more time to try some trickier recipes or new techniques. As for desserts – they are what got me started in the kitchen – see above! Baking is my original love, and this is where I share my weekend baking projects, with the occasional weeknight chocolate cake.
About James
You’ll hear me referencing James a lot in my recipes and my posts. He’s my husband, and my partner in the kitchen and in life. He’s a great sous chef when I need him to be, but he’s also a curious and enterprising head chef in his own right. Many of the recipes here are his or inspired by him, and he’s even requested his own section on the Recipes page. He’s introduced me to novelties such as leeks, butternut squash, and no-boil lasagna. He’s also taken on Asian cooking with gusto, and makes a mean marinade. He’s the stir fry king, and our fried rice is an amalgamation of our best selves. By day James is an experimental physicist whizzing microscopic particles around and around a ring, but at night he snuggles with our cat Dorothy and eats coconut yogurts. In the supermarket you can find him in the exotic fruits section looking for new melons to try.