Mediterranean Women Stay Slim, Too: Eating to Be Sexy, Fit, and Fabulous! Read Free

wish I could put ideas on the menu, hints about what it means not just to eat Mediterranean food but to fully embrace the Mediterranean life, where every bite matters, where only the best will do, and where every day is a passionate adventure. In a way, of course, that’s what I do by filling the Primo menu with the freshest, best seasonal foods, prepared with love and attention.
    In these pages, however, I have more room and more time to share some of my thoughts about what it means to be an American living in the Mediterranean spirit. I want to let you in on some of those secrets that I’ve discovered from my family, from Where I Come From
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    my travels, and from my grandfather Primo. Let me start by telling you a little bit about my family and how I got to where I am today.
    √ How I Got Here
    When I was a kid in school, I felt just a little different, especially in the lunchroom. When other kids took out their bologna sandwiches, potato chips, and Twinkies, I tried to act nonchalant as I opened up my thermos of (how embarrassing) bean and escarole soup. “What’s that smell?” my friends would ask, crinkling their noses at the pungent aroma of garlic wafting through the school cafeteria. I clapped the top back on. People just didn’t eat like that in America. What was my mother thinking?
    I would have done just about anything to bring a lunchbox full of chips and Twinkies to school. No such luck. My mother wasn’t about to pack fake food. Once when I was interviewed by the New York Times, I mentioned how badly I had wanted to eat Twinkies as a child. That year, my mother sent me a box of Twinkies for Christmas to finally fulfill my decades-long wish.
    Clever woman that she is, she knew perfectly well that by that point in my life her lessons had stuck, and of course, I wasn’t about to eat them.
    Now I realize that I was the lucky one. But at the time, although I had plenty of friends and enjoyed school, somehow my Italian family just didn’t behave like the other families I knew. It was more than the lunches, but it took me a while to figure out exactly what the differences were. We stood out as we lived and played and worked in our little neighborhood on Long Island. I didn’t know then that the way my family was raising me would influence my health, my attitude, my happiness, my ability to love, and even my waistline for the rest of my life.
    Our lives were very food centered. My father loved to bake Mediterranean Women Stay Slim, Too
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    bread, and my Italian grandmother taught me how to make pasta. We grew up very much in the Italian tradition right across the street from my mom’s side of the family. My grandfather Primo taught me a tremendous amount about food. His parents had moved to America from Italy, and food was very important to him. He was this big, robust Italian guy who lived life with gusto. He really knew how to enjoy himself, and his energy infiltrated our entire family as we sat around the dinner table to a traditional meal of soup, a little pasta, fish or meat or sometimes both, and a salad to finish.
    We had a garden in the yard, and we went fishing and crab-bing all the time. We always had fresh foods and a selection of meats that my grandfather would bring home from the butcher shop where he worked. It was all about the food and gathering the whole family around the table every night to eat, talk, laugh, and eat some more. The funny thing is—and this is only a cu-riosity if you are entrenched in the American way of eating—
    that while our table always seemed to overflow with abundance, our bites were little, our portions were small. Meals were about tasting a glorious selection of delicious foods, not about gorging on huge platefuls. An abundant variety tempered with moderation seemed to come naturally to all of us because we didn’t know any other way. With tremendous flavors before us, we didn’t feel the need to stuff ourselves.
    I couldn’t help noticing that a lot