Mely Martinez Books in Order

If you're new to her cookbooks: The Mexican Home Kitchen
If you want the best overview of her style: The Mexican Home Kitchen → Mexico in Your Kitchen
If you want more breakfasts, breads, and antojitos: Mexico in Your Kitchen

Mely Martinez grew up in Tampico, Tamaulipas, in a big family where the kitchen was part of everyday life. She started helping cook when she was young, and those early chores became her first lessons in how food carries memory. In her world, cooking was not a hobby set off to the side. It was part of family life, part of work, and part of the way people stayed connected.

Some of her strongest food memories come from summers on her grandmother's farm in Veracruz, where grinding corn for masa and cooking over a woodburning stove were normal parts of the day.

At 20, she moved to southern Mexico and worked as a teacher in Tabasco. That job opened up a wider map of regional cooking, because it also gave her chances to travel through the Yucatan Peninsula and taste foods far from the kitchen she knew in Tampico. Over the years she lived in several Mexican states and, by her own account, moved more than twenty times, picking up new ingredients, methods, and local dishes along the way.

The writing came later, and it started for a very down-to-earth reason.

After moving to Texas in 2008, she launched the bilingual blog Mexico in My Kitchen so her teenage son would one day be able to cook the dishes he grew up eating. What began as a family record grew into a much bigger project. Home cooks found her because the recipes felt clear, practical, and close to the food many Mexican families actually make at home.

Martinez has also kept studying the subject in a formal way. She has written about studying Mexican gastronomy and culinary history at the Escuela Superior de Gastronomía de México, and about building her own library of old and newer Mexican cookbooks. That mix of lived experience and research helps explain the tone of her work. She cooks from memory, but she also likes to know where a dish comes from and how it changes from place to place.

That approach is easy to see in The Mexican Home Kitchen, her first cookbook. It focuses on traditional home-style dishes and gives readers a solid base, with pantry notes, basic techniques, and recipes for the foods that show up again and again on Mexican tables. Readers who pick it up tend to find an inviting entry point: the food feels rooted in family and place, but the instructions are built for real home kitchens, not fantasy ones.

Her second cookbook, Mexico in Your Kitchen, widens the frame. It adds breakfasts, antojitos, breads, and more regional specialties, and it spends more time on food customs, ingredients, and the everyday meals that connect family, community, and celebration. If the first book opens the door, the second lets readers wander further into the house and stay a little longer.

Across both books, the pattern is pretty clear. Martinez returns again and again to the cooking of daily life, the kind of food people remember from childhood and repeat until it becomes part of the family story. She also makes room for Mexico's regional differences and gently pushes back against the idea that Mexican food is only restaurant food or always very spicy food. Much of what she shares is straightforward, comforting, and meant to be cooked, not admired from a distance.

She now lives in Dallas, Texas, and continues to share recipes with cooks around the world. That mix of memory, travel, study, and family feeling is what makes her books so approachable.