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The Team Behind Our Easy Comfort Food Recipes

Hey, I’m Mira. And I need to tell you how this whole thing started, because honestly, it is equal parts embarrassing and wonderful.

How Crispy Glaze Was Born 

I started Crispy Glaze in 2025 from my kitchen in Columbia, Maryland, armed with fifteen years of cooking Thai food from memory, a deep love for global flavors, and absolutely zero idea what I was doing as a food blogger.

I grew up in Thailand watching my mother cook like it was a performance, precise, instinctive, and completely impossible to write down. Every dish had a feel to it: the exact moment the galangal hit the oil, the sound the tamarind made when it dissolved into broth. When I moved to the US, recreating those dishes in a Western kitchen became a personal obsession. It took years. And somewhere in that process of failing, adjusting, tasting, and trying again, I fell in love with the act of recipe development itself.

So I built a site. I called it Crispy Glaze, because I was working on a honey-glazed chicken recipe at the time and could not think of anything better at midnight, which is exactly the kind of decision-making that defines the early days of any food blog.

The first year was me, alone, posting global flavors recipes that ranged from deeply Thai to boldly Korean to “I have no idea what cuisine this is but it tasted incredible.” People found it. Some of them stayed. And then I made the mistake, or the best decision of my life, depending on how you look at it, of joining an online food community to talk shop with other home cooks.

That is where I met three women who changed what Crispy Glaze was going to be.

The Day I Met Stacey, Shola, and Elena

It started with a thread. Someone had posted a question about the best way to build a roux for a cream-based soup, and within about forty comments, four of us had completely hijacked the conversation into a debate about whether comfort food needed to be complicated to be good. Stacey said no, firmly, with reasoning. Shola said flavor is never a shortcut, which I respected immediately. Elena said something in Spanish that I did not understand but the energy was clearly correct.

We moved to DMs. Then to a group chat. Then to a video call where nobody could stop talking about food for three hours straight. Within six months, all three of them had joined Crispy Glaze as contributors, and the site became something I never could have built alone: a full, honest, easy comfort food recipe collection that covers everything from a slow cooker chicken fajitas recipe on a Tuesday to a proper pork sinigang built for the weekend.

Here is who they are, and why you should trust every recipe that carries their name.

Stacey Allen, Recipe Developer 

“I test a recipe until it works the way a recipe should work: reliably, without drama, in the kind of kitchen real people actually have.”

Stacey is the most methodical person I have ever watched cook, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment.

She grew up in Delaware in a household where dinner was six o’clock, every night, without exception. Her mother cooked from scratch five nights a week using techniques she had never formally learned but had perfected through repetition over decades. Stacey spent most of her twenties reverse-engineering those techniques, figuring out the why behind the what, the science behind the instinct, until she understood not just how to make something taste good, but how to make it taste good every single time, for anybody.

She completed a professional recipe development certification through the International Association of Culinary Professionals and has since spent years applying that training to the kind of everyday home cooking that most recipe developers overlook: the foundational stuff, the recipes people actually need on a Wednesday night, the ones that should be unfussy but rarely are.

Stacey covers our hearty, foundational homemade comfort food on Crispy Glaze. Soups, chowders, potato dishes, the kind of bread that requires no stand mixer and no sourdough starter and still comes out right. She is the reason our recipes include what she calls “failure notes”, the specific things that go wrong when someone rushes a step, and exactly what to do about it.

Her testing standard: Every recipe is made a minimum of three times before publication. Once to establish the method. Once to stress-test it with substitutions. Once as a final check where she follows the written recipe exactly as a reader would, without any insider knowledge.

Her recipes on Crispy Glaze:

  • Chicken and Wild Rice Soup, her most-requested soup, and the one she makes every time someone in her life is sick or sad
  • Easy Potato Soup, the recipe she is most proud of for how little it costs and how much it delivers
  • Dumplings Chicken Noodle Soup, a proper chicken noodle soup for anyone who has ever been disappointed by a chicken noodle soup
  • Butternut Squash Soup, silky, warm, and the recipe that made three separate readers email us to say it changed how they feel about squash
  • Rotisserie Chicken Soup, weeknight comfort food chicken that starts from a store-bought bird and ends somewhere genuinely special
  • Vegetable Soup, the recipe that taught her, and now teaches our readers, how to stage vegetables by cooking time so nothing turns to mush

Explore Stacey’s category: Soup and Chowder Recipes → | Easy Homemade Breads → | Slow Cooker and Crockpot Recipes →

Shola Jackson, Comfort Food Specialist 

“People think I’m obsessed with flavor. I’m actually obsessed with the feeling food gives you. Flavor is just the vehicle.”

Shola has the kind of cooking instinct that takes most people twenty years to develop and she has been refining it since she was tall enough to stand at her grandmother’s stove in D.C.

Her grandmother cooked big. Big pots, big Sunday spreads, the kind of abundance that made everyone at the table feel like the most important person in the room. Shola absorbed that philosophy entirely, the idea that great food is fundamentally an act of generosity, and she has built her entire approach to recipe development around it.

She trained in culinary arts through a Washington D.C. community culinary program, which gave her the technical vocabulary to match what she had already learned intuitively at home. She has since developed recipes for local D.C. community food events, contributed to regional food publications, and spent the better part of the last decade developing the comfort food instinct that makes her Crispy Glaze’s go-to voice for the recipes people reach for when they genuinely need feeding, not just eating.

On Crispy Glaze, Shola covers the deep, slow, soulful end of homemade comfort food: the braises, the slow-cooked dishes, the recipes where time is an ingredient and rushing is the only real mistake. She writes the recipes people make when they want someone to feel taken care of. She is also the one who pushes back hardest when a recipe is “good enough” but not actually good, a standard the rest of us have come to rely on completely.

Her testing standard: Shola tests every recipe across different cookware, cast iron, stainless, nonstick, because she knows that results vary by equipment and she refuses to write a recipe that only works in one specific pan. She also tests reheating, because the best comfort food should taste just as good the next day.

Her recipes on Crispy Glaze:

Explore Shola’s category: Chicken Dinner Ideas → | Slow Cooker and Crockpot Recipes → | Soup and Chowder Recipes →

Elena Martinez, South American-Inspired Recipe Developer 

“My abuela cooked without recipes and everything was perfect. I cook with recipes so everything can be perfect for you too.”

Elena grew up in New York City with a Puerto Rican grandmother on one side and a Mexican-American mother on the other, which means she grew up understanding two very important things: that Latin food is not one thing, and that bold flavor is never the same as complicated cooking.

She has been cooking since she was tall enough to reach the counter and opinionated about it since approximately the same moment. At 33, she brings that depth of perspective, that understanding of sofrito as a foundation, of layered spice as a language, of rice as a cultural statement, to every recipe she develops. Her technical training came through a professional food styling and recipe development workshop in New York, which gave her the tools to translate intuitive, family-style cooking into reproducible, reliable written recipes. She subsequently contributed recipes to a New York-based bilingual food newsletter for two years before joining Crispy Glaze.

On Crispy Glaze, Elena covers the Latin-inspired recipes that sit squarely in the easy comfort food recipes space, the taco soups, the jerk chicken bowls, the sopapillas that make dessert feel like an event, as well as a growing range of breakfast and appetizer recipes that bring the same boldness to every part of the meal. She is also the team member most likely to tell you, correctly, that the recipe you think is complicated is actually fine if you just stop skipping the sofrito step.

Her testing standard: Elena tests every recipe for the specific flavor notes that distinguish a great version from a merely acceptable one. She writes what she calls a “flavor checkpoint” into every recipe, a moment where the cook should stop, taste, and know whether the dish is on track before it is too late to adjust. You will find those notes written into her recipe steps.

Her recipes on Crispy Glaze:

Explore Elena’s category: Chicken Dinner Ideas → | Easy Dessert Recipes → | Appetizers and Party Foods →

And Me, Mira De Jong | Global Flavors Recipe Creator 

I am the one who started all this, which means I am also the one who has made the most mistakes on this site and learned the most from them.

My cooking is shaped by growing up in Thailand and spending my adult life adapting those flavors for a kitchen that does not have my mother’s instincts or her spice market around the corner. I developed my recipe creation skills over fifteen years of obsessive home cooking, deepened through a structured recipe development course with a focus on Asian cuisines, and tested through the very demanding feedback loop of a food blog readership that will absolutely tell you when a recipe does not work.

On Crispy Glaze, I cover the global flavors end of our easy comfort food recipes collection: the Thai-influenced dishes, the Korean barbecue nights, the coconut curry weeknights, and the warm drinks collection that I built because I believe a good drink is as much a comfort food as anything on a plate. I am also the one responsible for the Asian Noodle and Ramen Recipes category, which I consider a personal project and an ongoing labor of love.

My testing standard: I test every recipe with the specific question: would someone who has never made this dish before succeed on the first attempt? If the answer is no, the recipe is not ready. I rewrite steps until the visual cues, the smell cues, and the timing notes are specific enough that a first-time cook has as good a chance as an experienced one.

My recipes on CrispyGlaze:

Explore my categories: Asian Noodle and Ramen Recipes → | Warm Drinks → | Chicken Dinner Ideas →

How We Test Every Recipe on CrispyGlaze

This part matters, so I am going to be specific about it.

Every recipe published on Crispy Glaze goes through at least three test rounds before it reaches you. The first round establishes the method, we cook it and eat it and identify every step that is unclear, every timing note that is off, every substitution that a reader will inevitably need. The second round stress-tests it: we swap ingredients, we use the wrong pan on purpose, we rush a step deliberately to see what breaks. The third round is the clean run, we follow the written recipe exactly as a reader would, without any insider knowledge of what is coming, and we verify that it works.

We write failure notes. If there is a step in the recipe where most people go wrong, we name it. We describe what it looks like when it goes wrong and what to do about it. This is the part most food blogs skip. We do not skip it.

We also write swap notes for common dietary restrictions and pantry gaps, because a recipe that only works with one specific brand of tamarind paste is not really a recipe for most people. Our goal is for every dish to be genuinely achievable in a real home kitchen, with real constraints, on a real weeknight, or a lazy Sunday, depending on which kind of cook you are and which kind of day you are having.

If you ever make one of our recipes and something does not work the way the recipe says it should, please tell us in the comments. We take that seriously. We update recipes when we get that feedback. That is what a food site run by actual home cooks looks like.

What CrispyGlaze Covers

Between the four of us, we cover a lot of ground. Here is what you will find on the site:

Frequently Asked Questions About Crispy Glaze

What makes a recipe an “easy comfort food recipe”? For us, easy means achievable by a home cook with standard kitchen equipment on a weeknight, without a grocery run for specialty ingredients. Comfort means the result feels like something worth sitting down for, not just fuel, but a meal that makes the day feel better. The two things together is what we build every recipe around.

Do you develop all your recipes from scratch? Yes. Every recipe on Crispy Glaze is developed, tested, and written by one of our four contributors. We do not aggregate, adapt without testing, or publish recipes we have not cooked ourselves multiple times.

What if a recipe doesn’t work for me? Leave a comment. Seriously. We read them, we respond to them, and when multiple readers flag the same issue we update the recipe. A recipe that does not reliably work is not a finished recipe by our standards.

Where can I start if I am new to Crispy Glaze? The best entry points are the Chicken Dinner Ideas category for weeknight dinners, the Soup and Chowder Recipes category for something warming and hearty, and the Easy Dessert Recipes category for when you need something sweet without a production. Or just start with whatever sounds good, that is the right way to use a recipe site.

Are you on social media? Yes. Find us on Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook. Each of us also has our own presence where we share the recipes we are testing, the things that went wrong, and occasionally our unfiltered opinions about how most people overcomplicate comfort food.

Welcome to Crispy Glaze. We are very glad you found us. Pull up a chair, there is always something on the stove.

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