About Us
We are Caitlin and Charles. And Erin, Maeve and Nora!
We are not chefs or cooks. Our training is legal, not culinary. Our cooking happens on the night shift and on weekends. By day, we are lawyers, working at our respective law firms in St. Louis, Missouri. By evening (and on demand) we are the Mom and Dad of our three girls: Erin, Maeve, and Nora. The blog is about our efforts to put tasty and healthful meals on the table each week, while balancing the demands of our jobs and growing girls.
Before we landed at our law firms, we each clerked for federal judges. Charles served as a law clerk to a federal magistrate judge here in Saint Louis and Caitlin served as a law clerk to a federal appellate judge in Memphis. But not at the same time. Before Caitlin clerked for her appellate judge, she was a law school intern with a certain magistrate judge in Saint Louis. The first half of the JudicialPeach name comes from that auspicious start in the our country’s Judicial Branch.
About the Blog
JudicialPeach was born in October 2008. At the time, Charles was looking for a convenient and central place to store his recipes. Between greasy hands and handwritten notations, his collection of printed recipes was quickly becoming indecipherable. The blog, with easy edits and digital permanency, was simply the best answer to the problem at hand.
The blog not only stored past recipes, it stored ideas for future ones as well. It stored his comments, and eventually, comments from readers. The blog showed restaurants on the horizon and specialty stores worth trying. Hyperlinks reminded us where we bought our vanilla beans and stone-ground grits. Embedded articles reminded us how to build a soufflé and how to coax meringues.
In the first few weeks, the blog was just cookbook recipes on a screen. Only a few errant bloggers seemed to find it, no doubt lost on the Internet highway. But with time, JudicialPeach became a place to collect our own creations, and in turn, it developed into an online destination.
About the Recipes
If a recipe is on our blog, we’ve made it — and probably a few times. Some of the recipes are straight from cookbooks. Other recipes may be adapted, but essentially unchanged. If that’s the case, we’ll provide the source of the recipe. Increasingly, though, we’ve set out to try things on our own. In that case, there is no attribution. If a recipe is our own, we take particular pride in it, toying with the ingredients and their quantities until we think we have it just right. Sometimes, that means making a recipe twice. But other times, it can take four or five tries to get it right.
Before we had kids, time seemed like no obstacle. We might steam our couscous and make homemade doughnuts. Time is a little more precious now and our recipes seek to recognize that reality. Our recipes try to accommodate the time constraints of two working parents while also allowing for home-cooked meals that are healthy and delicious.
If you’ve tried one of our own creations, we welcome your feedback.