Since Catherine Fulvio married her Sicilian husband, Claudio, she has gradually been seduced by the Italian way-of-life where people live to eat, instead eating to live. Catherine believes their Mediterranean diet is the answer to long-lasting health and happiness and so has structured her latest cookbook, Eat Like An Italian, like the Mediterranean food pyramid, with an introduction and tips scattered though-out about adapting to the healthy, leisurely Italian lifestyle.

Recognised by UNESCO as one of the healthiest diets in the world, The Mediterranean food pyramid encourages us to relish carbohydrates, drink alcohol daily in moderation, eat less meat and more fish and eggs for protein, and to eat more beans and legumes. Recipes include lasagne rolls, plum and Chianti soup, lamb stew with olives and lemon, imaginative everyday chicken dishes including chicken with prosciutto and shallots, and unique ice-cream recipes, fig, cappuccino and olive oil.

Every recipe shows how to tweak Italian dishes using local produce: Italian sausage pasta can be adapted using black pudding, risotto can be made with Bulmer’s pear cider instead of wine, local sheep cheese can be used instead of pecorino.

Beautiful food photography and lifestyle shots taken in Turin, Italy are sure to have readers hankering after ‘La Dolce Vita’ and with Catherine’s accessible recipes and tips she hopes that ‘we too can embrace this lifestyle and food culture by enjoying our very own local, seasonally fresh produce, prioritising our mealtimes, making them routine and including our friends and family, taking daily exercise and a drink in moderation’.

Catherine Fulvio is the proprietor of the Ballyknocken House Cookery School, a prolific cookery writer (with a regular column in The Sunday World) and one of Ireland’s top television culinary stars.

Eat Like An Italian is published on 7 September 2012, priced at €22.99 / £19.99.

Join Catherine Fulvio at The Red Line Book Festival where she will be giving a pre-Christmas cookery demonstration

Catherine Fulvio: Cooking The Books

The Civic Theatre, Tallaght

Friday 16th November at 1pm, Booking Essential