You have to sample food in my job, but I try to stop at one taste!
Catherine Fulvio’s secret to keeping her curves and not piling on the weight
SHE’S the woman responsible for bringing Irish cooking to the doors of emigrants who have been starved of soda bread and crave a dish of cabbage and bacon. But outside of her television career, Catherine Fulvio has more than one flavour to her life.
Between broadcasts she runs the Ballyknocken Cookery School, as well as being a mum of two teenagers.
With all of this going on, as well as being the creator of delicious meals and treats, Catherine admits it can be hard to keep an eye on her own health – including her waistline.
In this day and age, women aren’t really supposed to like their grub, especially those who are on our screens. Take Liz Hurley and her cabbage soup or Beyoncé’s lemonade diet and the countless other green drinks that supposedly leave us clean and serene but instead cause rumbling tummies and general grouchiness.
‘I love food,’ Catherine admits, her eyes twinkling as she talks about the passion that’s become her livelihood. ‘I absolutely adore it – I am always experimenting and creating and developing recipes. And in my job you have to taste food. If you don’t taste what you’ve made, you don’t know how good it is.’
So how does Catherine manage to keep her curves without going overboard?
‘It is just stopping myself having that second taste,’ she laughs. ‘Years ago I would have been almost nervous of saying that I love food because you always think ‘I want to look my best.’
‘But I have to work very hard to maintain a healthy weight and it’s only recently that I’ve started to realise everyone else is the same. When I am going round the country doing cookery demonstrations I meet so many other women and men who come up to me and say how difficult it is when you are holding down more than a full-time job when you have family to look after, work to do, kids to drive around the place. It is a hard choice for everybody and it does require a lot of discipline.
‘And it seems like people can’t be seen to be eating that cake, but for me it’s a case of everything in moderation. And moderation is the important word. I like to know that I can have that mini -muffin and know that it’s not the end of the world.’
It’s hard to do, she says, especially for women who were brought up in the era of faddy diets.
‘I was brought up in the 1980s where we were all told ‘Oh no fat! You can’t eat this and you can’t eat that and you need to point this out,’ Catherine says.
‘But now moderation is the key. Exercise in moderation, eat in moderation and never feel deprived. And that is the only thing that works for me.’
SO there will be a delicious scone or a slice of cake but mealtimes with the children are healthy and balanced. But when Catherine is on the move she is, she says, just like the rest of us – a bit of a grab-and-go merchant.
‘I have taken 38 flights in the last year and I have my teenagers and business at home,’ she says. ‘So I am go, go, go and that is the lifestyle I have embraced.
‘I enjoy my life and the opportunities given to me very much. I do find it hard to always make the right choices, especially when you are travelling. When you find yourself at an airport at random hours, you also find yourself eating the first thing that comes to hand.
‘What I try to do is in my downtime when I am back at home I try to balance it all out. You have to try and regain it back in because you only have one body so you have to look after it.’
IT’S something that’s easier said than done, she says, but Catherine makes up for the indulgent times by ensuring she’s back on the straight and narrow when she is at home.
‘I am back from travelling now, I came back at the weekend so I am, finished and I won’t be getting on another flight this year. So now I am making sure I get three healthy meals a day, good value protein in particular I’m looking at my fruit and veg and packing it into my kids now that I am going to breathe down their necks.
‘And doing exercise. I am back at the gym and I love walking too. We have a forest behind our farmhouse and I head in there for a walk. I love being in touch with nature. I do about 30 minutes a day and I have downloaded an app. I mean who has an app for walking! Why can’t you just get out the door and walk?’ she says, laughing at her own need for extra motivation.
‘But it’s one of these ones that annoys you and tells you ‘You haven’t done your walk today’. It gives you that itch. It’s a ‘feel good’ thing and the whole tracking thing helps.
‘But it can pull you back as well because I am the kind of person that if I don’t meet my target I will throw all caution to the wind and just say to hell with it, I will have that slice of cake. I have to be very disciplined with myself as I know my own personality.’
The last few years have seen a raft of different detoxes - from no carb to glutenfree being tipped as the way to stay healthy.
‘I believe that is a phase and I think it will pass, like all phases do, ’Catherine says. ‘It’s like the low fat diets of the 1980s. There are people with genuine allergies and intolerances but there is also a lifestyle choice and that definitely is a phase.
‘It’s time for people who don’t have coeliac disease or other serious conditions to start looking at a balanced diet instead. And the tide is already turning - the whole low carb thing is beginning to phase out.’
So with that in mind, as the mother of two teenagers, does Catherine worry about the effect the fads and barrage of advice from the unqualified of Instagram is having on her kids?
‘I used to,’ she admits. ‘My daughter Charlotte is now 16 and it is like she has turned a corner. She eats healthily and makes healthy choices and it is not an all-or-nothing thing with her.
‘What I don’t want her to do is grow up like me. I left school at 16, I was very young doing my Leaving Cert and I put myself under terrible pressure to do my Leaving, to be skinny – all these kinds of things. I was way too immature in my life to be taking on that kind of pressure. I mean, I started UCD at 16. I left
The tide is already turning and the whole low-carb thing is beginning to phase out
home and was living in a flat in Dublin. I couldn’t imagine my daughter now in the same position. But I don’t want her to even be thinking I need to look slimmer than I am and having that mentality of living up to the expectations of peers.
‘And I think I have got her over that now – she is very much comfortable in her own skin. She is not overconfident, she is not underconfident and that is the right way to be. ‘
And for Rowan, who has just turned 15, Catherine’s policy is to try and get him involved in activity that doesn’t include playing video games.
‘He is big into sport which is good as when it comes to the boys, sport is great. And if I could keep him away from the Xbox that would be great.
‘I am like every other mother in the country in that the worry is that the kids are living sedentary and isolated lives.’
And there is a way of dealing with this. In Catherine’s home she and her husband Claudio try to make mealtimes sacrosanct.
‘You could walk into the house and everybody could have a phone in their hand and nobody could be talking,’ she says. ‘So we put the phones away, we sit down, we chat and have our meals together. We don’t have meals together seven nights a week but we definitely have them a good four to five nights.
‘And if we are missing a dinner and I am out and about late in the evenings, I will make sure we have breakfast together at the weekends, phones away and chatting. Because otherwise you have no idea what’s going on in each other’s lives. That’s not the way I grew up and I really don’t want the years to pass and then wonder if I missed a trick in the years when my children were growing up.’
The third series of Catherine’s Tastes Like Home is about to hit our television screens this Monday on RTÉ One at 7.30pm. Sponsored by Londis, the show sees Catherine once again jet across the world to supply some of our own delicacies to people who have made lives for themselves on far shores.
It’s a warm and emotive show with a few tears besides.
‘I bring a flavour of family home cooking to someone has emigrated,’ Catherine says. ‘And with the meal there’s a message from home. The food has been made with love and sent over to someone who the person in Ireland misses dearly.
‘And it’s when people are eating the dish that Mum made, that’s when the emotions come out, that’s when people really feel they miss Ireland and everything about it.’
It is also, of course, an opportunity to showcase the fantastic Irish produce we have to offer to people from all over the world. In fact, Catherine’s shows have already been snapped up by Canadian television, leading to an influx of people from the country to Ballyknocken, who want to learn about Irish cuisine.
‘People are always surprised that it is Irish food,’ Catherine says. ‘They are blown away by our natural flavours, our wonderful produce and how we can make such amazing food out of great ingredients.
I don’t think we have cultivated a culture of having Irish restaurants as opposed to French restaurants or Italian restaurants – that side of things has never really been part of our culture. But what we do believe is that Irish people are much more aware of the quality of their local ingredients. They are aware when they are in a French restaurant having a steak that it is an Irish steak. I think it’s more about using the ingredients we have – the wonderful cheeses, the meats. The fish and seafood and the amazing vegetables.’
The show, though, is not just about the soda farls, champ and coddle. In fact, at its heart is something that all of us will be familiar with.
‘It’s not just the food, it’s a memory. People imagine themselves back sitting at that kitchen table with their mother or their grandmother or aunt making that particular dish all those years ago. It’s a memory.’
This series has brought Catherine as far afield as New Zealand and Australia and over the last three series, there have been some heartbreaking moments.
‘When you are filming and asking the family here in Ireland what they think of the fact that their loved one lives abroad, invariably they will say they are really proud of them they are really pleased for them,’ Catherine says.
‘In one instance the lady’s son had settled and had married with a family where he was living and she had other children who were scattered around the world and she was the only one still living in Ireland.
‘And she told me it was great and she enjoyed travel – she was so positive about it and I thought that was brilliant to see the positives. But I turned to her when we were filming and said “Have you a message for your son?” And it was then that the tears started to flow. She had been putting on a brave face but the reality of it is that you are always going to miss your loved ones if they are far away. It’s very hard for parents especially I think.’
And there is certainly something about cooking that brings comfort to children and adults alike.
‘In every family home even nowadays there is always a recipe that a parent makes for their child that the child loves which will be recreated down the line – whether it’s a chicken curry, a lasagne or meatballs. It could be anything!
‘But there is always one key thing that people associate with Mummy or Daddy or Auntie or Granny making really well. In every family home, there is always a recipe that a parent makes for their child that the child loves.’
And, as Catherine will testify, when it comes to cooking for family, love is probably the most important ingredient of all. ÷Tastes Like Home begins on RTE One at 7.30pm this Monday.
It’s when people are eating the dish that mum made that the emotions come out