About
My name is Donna Pilato. I’m also known as “DP”, hon, mom, and mommy. I’ve been married for a verrrrry long time to a man named Joe (okay, it doesn’t really seem that long). We have two charming daughters. The 15-year-old we’ll call Annie and the 12-year-old we’ll call Louisa. We live in a typical, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses suburb on the East Coast. We also share our house with four adopted cats named Felix, Tommy, Timmy, and Marshall. We also have two guinea pigs named Burrito and Fluff (yes, there is a food theme to their names).
I love eating good food and playing in the kitchen. I do my best to cook as my before-kids self would (in the days when most meals came straight from the pages of Bon Appetit), while dealing with the compromises necessary for pleasing the still-developing palates of kids. We’re making progress.
I’ve been writing and blogging about entertaining and parties as the Entertaining Guide at About.com for almost 12 years. It continues to be fun, and I hope to continue as the Entertaining Guide for many years.
Food has been a hobby of mine since I was first married. It began with my new husband’s lukewarm response to my cooking. Instead of becoming offended, I took it as a challenge to improve my kitchen skills and started to collect cookbooks and cooking magazines. The hobby began to take on a life of its own as I started to prefer my own cooking over takeout or restaurants – unless we went to a really good one. Stupid, I know.
My food hobby moved beyond an interest in recipes to a general interest in food – trends, science, nutrition, cultures, diets, abundance, and lack thereof – you get the big picture. Everywhere I turn there’s something new to learn and think about food since it’s one of the main preoccupations of our planet.
Unfortunately, the more I read the more it seems to me that our Food Planet has become filled with contradictions. A few years ago they said coffee was bad for us. Today we’re told it’s good to drink coffee. Once upon a time margarine was going to save our hearts. Today trans fats are among the greater food evils. Low carbs, low fats, raw food, macrobiotics – I can’t really tell you what’s the best prescription for our long term health. And I don’t really think the scientists can either.
In addition, many of us are becoming painfully aware of the industrialization of our food supply. Maybe it’s okay, but then again, maybe it’s not so good. It’s hard to know where we can find good food, which is all any of us really want. So in my search for good food and food that is good for me and my family, I ingest all of the information I can get with an extra grain of salt. I chew it up, digest it for a while, and form my own conclusions.
And that’s just what I do with this blog. I share my personal and family food experiences, with a view to making sense of it all. I’ll tell you about food I like to eat, like to cook, and like to have cooked for me. Because, life on this planet really boils down to getting something good to eat.
