About Jess

[photo by Clare Barboza]

Hi. I’m Jess. By trade, I’m a freelance writer and recipe developer. I cook a lot, eat a lot, and type a lot. Not a bad life. My memoir about eating and traveling with my now-8-year-old, who has cerebral palsy, is called A Year Right Here: Adventures with Food and Family in the Great Nearby. (The New York Times loved it!) Most recently, I wrote My Rice Bowl: Korean Cooking Outside the Lines, along with Seattle chef Rachel Yang–look for it in September 2017.

I co-wrote A Boat, a Whale and a Walrus: Menus and Stories with Seattle chef Renee Erickson, and I’m also the author of Dishing Up Washington (Storey Publishing), Pike Place Market Recipes (Sasquatch Books), and Top Pot Hand-Forged Doughnuts: Secrets and Recipes for the Home Baker (Chronicle Books).

The way I see it, my job is to make people happy and full, both physically and mentally. I hope to educate my readers on how cooking, eating, and living a healthy lifestyle can coincide. (Don’t laugh. I don’t always write about doughnuts.) And while I want my recipes to work, I want more than anything for my readers to look to cook from the heart.

I write for many local, regional, and national publications. Find links to clips on my writing page.

When I started hogwash, I wanted a name that was emblematic of what I’d been writing about, food and life, and also of Seattle. Pike Place Market served as an obvious starting point. But I didn’t want to get too serious. It is all hogwash, these here words. And Rachel, the big bronze pig that stands at the market’s entrance, seemed to fit my purpose. She was there when it all started.

You probably landed here via a recipe from the big project: I wrote a recipe a day for all of 2007.  I started it because I needed a goal; I was new to town and unsure I’d ever push my way into Seattle’s food-writing world. I needed a good assignment. I was least certain about finding an outlet for recipe writing (I’d done plenty of it on Cape Cod, testing and developing recipes for cookbooks and supermarket magazines and such, and I loved it), and was curious to find the answer to the question everyone asks me: What do you eat at home? I’d often said I never cooked the same thing twice in a year’s time.

It was interesting. Not sure I’d do it again, but by golly, I’m glad I did it. And I’m even happier that it’s over.

Besides all that, I’m a person, too: Mom to a spunky 8-year-old. Wife. Skier. I hate cleaning out the recycling bin. I love fall. I hate the feeling of sand stuck between my toes, but I’m always ready for an adventure.

Don’t be shy. Tell me what you’d like to see cooked up around here.