Catherine Jessee
Catherine Jessee is a food editor and recipe developer whose work centers on practical, comforting cooking for everyday home cooks, grounded in test-kitchen discipline and close attention to what people are actually making and saving.
At Allrecipes, she shapes service pieces that organize weeknight-friendly dinners, casseroles, and seasonal comfort food into clear, repeatable options that readers can drop straight into their meal plans. Her assignments routinely frame recipes as “for every night of the week,” “back-pocket dinners,” or “comfort food” collections, showing a focus on reliable staples rather than one-off showpieces. Across these packages she contributes both editorial curation and her own recipes, building a portfolio that leans on familiar ingredients, straightforward methods, and dishes that hold up in busy households.
Beyond this masthead, she works as a writer, editor, and recipe developer whose work has appeared across a range of food publications, including Food & Wine, Real Simple, Serious Eats, Southern Living, Simply Recipes, and others. In those roles she has developed and cross-tested recipes for multiple brands in a shared publishing family, delivering final recipes and supporting digital assets across different audience segments. Her independent site further underlines that mix of skills, presenting her as a writer, editor, and recipe developer with a broad freelance and editorial portfolio in food media.
She also runs Weekday Warriors, a newsletter on food and culture that focuses on inspiration for mealmaking through the week and occasionally features interviews with chefs, artists, and friends who shape her cooking and creative perspective. That project mirrors the themes in her edited work, blending everyday dinner logistics with the emotional and cultural texture around how people eat at home.
Weekly recipe saves and reader favorites
Jessee’s recurring coverage of “most-saved” roundups tracks what Allrecipes readers are actively planning to cook, turning internal save data into short, pointed stories about current favorites. In “Our 5 Most-Saved Recipes Last Week,” she highlights Banana Pudding Dump Cake as the week’s top saver, noting how it layers classic banana pudding flavors into an easy cake built from a mix.
The same piece pulls out back-to-school dinners such as Honey Garlic Chicken Bites, Pork Chops in Dijon Mustard Sauce, and Camp David Spaghetti, positioning them as practical, crowd-pleasing mains for busy evenings.
She uses seasonality as another organizing lens in this format, pointing to Slow Cooker Shepherd’s Pie as proof that fall cooking is “in the air” when it rises on the saves chart. In a related “most-saved” treatment, she spotlights a family recipe, My Aunt Faye’s orange Jell-O salad, describing its crushed pineapple, orange-flavored gelatin, cream cheese, whipped topping, and chopped pecans as a staple dessert in her own household. These pieces show her combining data-driven selection with personal and community storytelling, giving readers context around why certain dishes resonate right now.
Back-pocket dinners and comfort cooking
A separate line of Jessee’s work focuses on “back-pocket” and “every night of the week” dinner collections, which map out complete weeks of simple, repeatable meals. In features such as “12 Back-Pocket Dinners Our Editors Make Again and Again,” she contributes editor picks like Brunswick Stew, calling it her go-to stew and a practical way to use leftover meat while delivering a hearty, vegetable-packed winter meal. That framing emphasizes thrift and comfort together: the stew solves a leftovers problem and lands as a cold-weather staple.
She extends the same logic to protein-specific roundups, including “7 Chicken Breast Dinners for Every Night of the Week,” where she describes a creamy chicken and asparagus bake as a quick and easy spring dinner built on classic flavor pairings. In “7 Chicken Casseroles for Every Night of the Week,” she contributes her Lemon Chicken and Rice Casserole, built by browning chicken thighs and baking them with rice, lemon, and cream of chicken soup, presented as an effortless mid-week comfort dish. Another comfort-focused package, “7 Comfort Food Recipes for Every Night of the Week,” again slots that casserole into a weekly lineup, reinforcing how she returns to the same dependable recipes when plotting out a week of meals.
Desserts, snacks, and no-bake treats
Jessee’s portfolio also includes desserts and snackable recipes that stay aligned with her preference for accessibility and minimal fuss. She develops and describes recipes like a 5-ingredient fried pickle dip, defining its texture and flavor in test-kitchen detail: toasted savory breadcrumbs and chips brightened with fresh dill to evoke a “fried pickle” exterior, and a thick yet creamy dip with dill aroma from pickle brine.
In a cannoli riff, she introduces cannoli rangoons and focuses on the contrast between pistachios and chocolate chips, noting that both offer distinct but equally appealing flavor experiences in the filling.
Her dessert writing stretches beyond traditional baking to no-bake solutions, including a Whipped Greek Yogurt Chocolate Mousse framed as a chocolate dessert so easy that anyone can make it. That piece walks readers through short, straightforward steps and a 10-minute prep time, emphasizing microwave-melted chocolate, a simple mixer method, and chill time instead of oven work. In holiday coverage, she singles out Saltine Cracker Toffee as a recipe she once overlooked but now seeks to make with toasted pecans and other toppings, showing how her own taste shifts feed into the recipes she elevates.
Test kitchen perspective and food culture
Jessee brings a test-kitchen and editorial background to explanatory pieces, including coverage of slow-cooker technique where she warns that overfilling with liquid can hurt a recipe and even cause boil-over, speaking directly from her experience as an editor and former test kitchen expert. In nostalgic food-culture writing, she recounts waiting all year for a seasonal watermelon milkshake at a fast-food chain, describing icy sweet bits of watermelon with creamy vanilla as a morale-boosting treat after hot summer kitchen shifts.
Those anecdotes link pro kitchen realities with the emotional charge of specific foods, adding dimension to her otherwise highly practical service writing.
Her evergreen editorial role and newsletter interviews further underline that blend of craft and culture, giving her a vantage point both inside structured recipe collections and in looser conversations about how people cook, eat, and find inspiration during the week. Across these different formats, Jessee’s coverage distinguishes itself by marrying tested, weeknight-ready recipes with a clear sense of reader behavior and lived kitchen experience, rather than treating food purely as aspirational lifestyle content.
4 more food journalists.
Aaron Guerrero
Aaron Guerrero is head of the digital department at Miami’s Community Newspapers, where he pairs restaurant coverage with community-facing content. He focuses on how Miami-area restaurants evolve, celebrate, and experiment through new concepts, menus, and neighborhood-focused dining experiences. He reports on restaurant openings, such as an Italian food hall at Plaza Coral Gables, new executive lunch menus, and wood-fired Latin steakhouse brunches, explaining what sets each venue apart. He also covers awards, like a Wine Spectator honor for an Italian chophouse, and events that turn dining rooms into social hubs. His bylines extend to features on sports-themed gatherings, civic renamings, local visits to restaurant programs, sponsored community pieces, and official notices. His work is straightforward and descriptive, helping readers and local businesses connect around specific openings, promotions, and dining experiences.
Aarron Fleming
Aarron Fleming reports on how courts, jails and public safety systems work over time. He is a reporter at The Daily Memphian covering public safety, the local court system, suburban news and business developments in North Mississippi. His work follows trials, sentencing, appeals, plea deals and judicial decisions, including major cases tied to Tyre Nichols and rapper Young Dolph. He also covers jail conditions, inmate deaths, crime data, prosecution units, trafficking, shootings and public-order incidents. His suburban reporting examines cannabis businesses, restaurant openings and how commercial growth affects communities such as Olive Branch. Fleming previously covered education in the same newsroom. He uses clear, unadorned prose to explain legal steps, deadlines, institutional problems and the political, commercial and community effects of public-safety decisions.
Alana Al-Hatlani
Alana Al-Hatlani is a food writer and editor who treats recipes, restaurants, and food features as ways to explore culture, community, and the business of eating. She works on the food team at Southern Living, overseeing and contributing to print recipes and reported features. Her pastry-focused, restaurant-tested perspective comes from time in restaurant and bakery kitchens. She helps plan and write monthly food packages, including “The South’s Most Treasured Desserts,” and wrote “8 Summer Recipes Our Editors Make Every Year.” She also writes recipe tips, ingredient explainers, restaurant guides, and reported stories about workers, owners, and communities. Her subjects include regional specialties, dining scenes, kitchen basics, and food industries. Her work has appeared with OpenTable and Yahoo. She reports on the ground, explains techniques clearly, and connects specific dishes and places to larger stories about food and livelihood.
Alana Edgin
Alana Edgin is a business reporter whose strongest focus is food, restaurants and consumer-facing businesses. She works at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal and has also had work syndicated across AOL and Yahoo News. She covers new openings, closings, expansions and franchise growth, along with retail, health, services, corporate news, data incidents, business support programs and sponsorships. Her reporting includes detailed roundups of new restaurants and businesses, coverage of El Pollo Loco’s opening, and stories on burger trucks, dessert shops, Vietnamese sandwich restaurants and gourmet markets. She also contributes to food and drink reviews, including fall coffee and jerky comparisons. Edgin reports with practical “what, when, where” details, structured comparisons and clear explanations of how offers, partnerships and business changes affect consumers and the local economy.