When her husband, chef Giancarlo, was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, food writer Katie Caldesi discovered how to cook their Italian favourites in a different way
RECIPES KATIE AND GIANCARLO CALDESI
Since first meeting Giancarlo 25 years ago, we have set up two Italian restaurants and a cookery school together. I have written about Italian food for years and after Giancarlo’s type 2 diabetes diagnosis, I started to write low-carbohydrate recipe books. Our latest book, The Low Carb Italian Kitchen: Modern Mediterranean Recipes for Weight Loss and Better Health (Kyle Books, £20), is a marriage of these two worlds.
You might ask: how can a diet that includes pasta and a dessert like tiramisu be low carb? It’s a conundrum that I’ve had to face over the past 10 years after discovering Giancarlo had type 2 diabetes. The fact that we’ve included pasta in our new book might raise some eyebrows in the low-carb world, but it would seem that we can tolerate some pasta in our diets, as it doesn’t affect our glucose levels as much as something like bread does. What we can’t tolerate, though, is huge bowlfuls of it! At home, we either omit the pasta altogether and instead have shredded vegetables – such as ribbons of cabbage – or mix the two, which is actually delicious because you get the bite, satiety and comfort of pasta, but without as many carbs.
In the book, we recommend 25g of dried pasta per serving (and a maximum of 130g of carbohydrates a day). But pasta swells to around double in size, and mixing it with cabbage ribbons gives added volume. For ease, you can even cook the cabbage in the same pan of water as the pasta.
When Giancarlo was first diagnosed, he cut out obvious forms of sugar, such as sweet pastries and fizzy drinks. We didn’t really take it very seriously but we should have. I had no idea what a horrible, insidious disease it is, and how it can cause you to become hangry and moody before you eat. That can really cause problems in a relationship, but it’s the food that’s wrong, not your marriage! I’m joking, but now that we eat a low-carb diet, I do feel as if I’ve got a new husband!
We started taking a change of diet seriously when we were told that as well as having type 2 diabetes, Giancarlo was also gluten intolerant. It was a double whammy but it probably saved his life. Because he had to give up all wheat-based foods, it really did mean he couldn’t have those huge bowlfuls of pasta. It wasn’t easy at first and he was quite depressed for a while. He found it very sad that he had to give something up that had been a joy in his life for a long time. But he did lose loads of weight (almost four stone in total) and started to feel so much better. We learned that starchy foods turn to sugar in the body, and that Giancarlo had reduced the huge blood sugar spikes tha
