About Domenica Marchetti

(photo by Olga Berman)

Benvenuti! Welcome to Domenica Cooks. I am the author of four books on Italian cooking:

* The Glorious Pasta of Italy (Chronicle Books, 2011)
* Williams-Sonoma Rustic Italian: Simple, Authentic Recipes for Everyday Cooking (Weldon Owen, 2011)
* Big Night In: More Than 100 Wonderful Recipes for Feeding Family and Friends Italian Style (Chronicle Books, 2008)
* The Glorious Soups and Stews of Italy (Chronicle Books, 2006)

My fifth book, The Glorious Vegetables of Italy, is scheduled to be published in 2013.

I am also the author of this blog, which I like to think of as my online kitchen. It’s where I hang out and share my home cooking adventures.

Before I was a cookbook author and food writer, I was a newspaper reporter. I wrote about all kinds of things: school board meetings, the latest fitness craze, bizarre murders, and how billionaire philanthropists like to give away their money. I hardly ever wrote about food, even though it was what I thought about most and I spent much of my free time reading cookbooks and playing around in the kitchen. Years after I had graduated from Columbia School of Journalism and worked at numerous newspapers, it finally struck me that I ought to be writing about food.

I grew up in an Italian family. At the dinner table we spent more time talking about what we should eat the next night than about politics or the news of the day. My mother is a native of Chieti, a picturesque hilltop city in Abruzzo, not far from the Adriatic coast. She had my sister and me shaping gnocchi and ravioli by the time we could see over the kitchen counter.

We spent our summers in Italy with my mother’s three sisters (all great cooks); each year my father (a Rhode Island native whose parents both came from Italy) planned trips around the peninsula, guided by where the best local food and wine were to be found.

Italian home cooking is my first passion in the kitchen. Food is at the center of Italian family life and I have probably spent the equivalent of half my hours on this earth in kitchens and around dinner tables, cooking, eating, talking, arguing, and socializing. If I’m exaggerating, it is not by much. The food I cook is the food I love to eat and feed others: simple, honest dishes that reflect my heritage and the seasons.

My recipes and articles on Italian home cooking have been widely published in national publications including Cooking Light, Fine Cooking, Food and Wine, Health, and The Washington Post; and online at Leite’s Culinaria, NPR Kitchen Window, and Apartment Therapy’s The Kitchn.

You can find links to my published work here. If you are interested in contacting me for writing, recipe and menu development, cookbook proposal and cookbook writing consultation, or other related editorial or corporate projects, please feel free to email me at domenica at domenicacooks dot com. I am also on Twitter (@domenicacooks) and on Facebook (facebook.com/domenicacooks).