As bean an tí go, Catherine Fulvio is very much the cool, modern incarnation. Passionate about sustainability, nutrition and great flavour, she runs Ballyknocken House, County Wicklow, with the same down-to-earth, cope-with-anything attitude honed by generations of Irish women over the ages. She talks to Carissa Casey about going online, going back to school and the slow path back to normality.

It’s not often that a successful business woman and a busy mother of two gets to celebrate academic success, so it’s only right to give food guru, Catherine Fulvio, a round of applause. During the pandemic she went back to school to do an advanced diploma in nutrition and health coaching. When we talk, she’s just found out she passed.

This was far from her only achievement during the pandemic. She filmed another of her popular food programmes, Catherine Celebrates, which recently screened on RTÉ. She moved her cooking courses online with a wealth of new content. And along with the rest of the staff at Ballyknocken House, she undertook mentorship with her local enterprise office in how to be more sustainable. Now the cookery school and upmarket farmhouse bed and breakfast is open for business again and she’s as busy as she ever was.

But it wasn’t all plain sailing for Catherine during the various lockdowns. When the pandemic first hit, “it was a shock,” she says. “I spent a lot of time watching The Chase on TV to pass the time. And then I just shook myself off. In business there’s a responsibility towards your customers, a responsibility towards your staff, you’ve buildings to maintain, you’ve your family to keep, so you have to be creative.”

So  she put her thinking cap on and came up with the concept of creating an online cooking school. She created downloadable courses to suit just about anyone, across a huge range of themes. There are courses on Italian cooking, on mains, on deserts, ones aimed at transition year students, another one for kids. “People can learn at their own pace, when they want, wherever they want. They can rewind and watch the videos again and again so that they can really master those recipes.”

Alongside that she’s done live cook-alongs with private groups based here and internationally. “It’s been amazing where the business has come from. I even did a live cook-along at a big lawyers conference in Florida. They’d been to Ballyknocken a few years ago and remembered me very fondly and asked would I do it. I said ‘fantastic’. It was an opportunity you wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

While the cookery school will be open again to the general public in September, Catherine has every intention of building on her online school, with new courses based around her nutrition learning. 

“We would not have had these opportunities were it not, unfortunately, for the pandemic because we had to get creative and rethink how we were going to do our business. So we feel blessed that we had the right team, with the right knowledge, to be able to get up and running in a different area altogether,” she says.

Cooking was very much to the fore of most people’s lives during the lockdowns. Dinner became the highlight of our days and a break from the monotony of life spent at home round the clock, week-in week-out. According to Catherine, people started to get a lot more interested in eating healthily. “I noticed a lot of people were more concerned with regard to getting their nutrients in their diet, to protect themselves should they get ill. It makes logical sense,” she says.

With that insight, she decided to go back to school and brush up on her nutritional knowledge. “I can register as a nutrition and health coach now but I did it purposefully so that I could bring that level of information to my cookery classes,” she says.

“It’s the stuff I’m interested in myself. As you get older you want to make sure you’re protecting yourself for longevity. I was looking at my diet and asking myself ‘am I covered here”, ‘am I getting the right nutrients on a weekly basis’. I don’t look at it on a day by day basis, I look at it on an overall weekly basis.”

“Then there are my kids. They’re teenagers now and they’re into things that they were never into before. I remember battling with them trying to get them to eat peas. And now they’re asking for avocado and guacamole, all sorts. I want to make sure they’re getting what they need. They’re going to be in exam mode for the next few years and I want to be sure they’re well covered in terms of their nutrients. It’s important. There is such a thing as brain food. There is food for everything that we need. We can choose to ignore these things or we can embrace them and empower ourselves to put ourselves in the best possible position for good health.”

All that said, she’s not one to deny pleasure. “I’ve always been of the opinion – everything in moderation. I do fail in that area I will admit when it comes to chocolate. I’m the same as everybody, I have my weaknesses.”

She also believes that there was a lot more planning and thought put into preparing dinner. “It was something to look forward to and, because everyone worked in their homes in separate rooms in most places, it was a reason for them to sit down together and enjoy each other’s company over a meal. The wholesomeness of the family meal came back during the pandemic I feel.”

The other trend she noticed is an increased focus on food waste. “I’ve always been speaking very loudly about food waste. It’s very bad not just for our purse but for our environment. A lot of people really embraced that during the pandemic and started looking at what they had, what they were buying and how to utilise their ingredients better and plan better to ensure there wasn’t wastage. And during the pandemic, it wasn’t just the environment or the pocket, going to the shops was a bit of a headache, a bit of a palaver, so the easier you can make it on yourself, the better you plan, the better for everybody.”

At Ballyknocken house, Catherine decided to spend whatever downtime was left to learn more about sustainability. “We were always highly aware of it. We grow our own food and we made huge efforts to eliminate one-use plastic, all of that kind of thing. But we all went back to school in that sense and learned an awful lot. So we’re very much implementing a sustainable approach to running our business. I think that’s very important moving forwards that we all give back to our environment as much as we can. And it was really nice for us to do that. It wasn’t just for us but it was something for the greater world at that time.”

For all this positive activity, Catherine also admits that the pandemic got to her at times. “I probably come across as having lots of energy. When I’m enthusiastic about something I’m always very energetic. But there were times when I was struggling mentally. It’s been a lot of highs and lots of lows. Thankfully we managed to keep Covid away from the door for all of us here and the greater community at Ballyknocken. 

She credits a lot of her can-do attitude with her background. “I grew up at Ballyknocken where my mum had the farmhouse bed and breakfast and my dad had the farm. As kids, we would have worked in the bed and breakfast and/or on the farm. We were well used to being very busy.”

And that, strangely, was the biggest challenge she faced this last year or so - the lack of busy-ness. “My mind would be racing but my body wouldn’t be moving at the same pace. Or my mind would be racing but for no reason. It wasn’t like there was a group arriving the next day at Ballyknocken and I wanted to be prepared for it. That was all taken away. I do find it hard to calm down, to destress, to relax. It’s interesting, it’s probably my next big challenge.”

For her, cooking is relaxation. “I put my favourite music on, have my bottle of sparkling water or whatever I’m drinking at the time, and I find it so relaxing and always have. It’s creative and a little challenging - a recipe might not turn out the way you want it to be.”

It’s particularly heartening to hear a cook as renowned as Catherine admit that her recipes don’t always work out. “To perfect a recipe, you might be doing it four or five times before you get it spot on,” she says.

The highlight of the next few weeks will be the arrival of the first international groups at Ballyknocken House, since pre-Covid times. “It’s going to be so exciting,” she says. “I think I’ll be at the road waving when they arrive. We actually have bookings later in August, from the United States. I can’t believe our luck. How we manage them when they get here, we’ll have to wait and see what the regulations are at the time. But we’re so excited because that’s the business I’ve known all my life and all my career here at Ballyknockan. To see it coming back, for me, it’s a real sense of normality. It makes me feel like we’re on a path to recovery.”

In September and October a whole new range of online courses will be available, with a particular focus on nutrition. “I put it out on social media, what courses would people like and the most popular one that came back, was healthy family meals. You think you’re going to hear keto and all that. You hear some of that. I have a new gluten free course coming out because there’s a lot of demand for that. But healthy family meals – recipes that don’t take all day to prepare but that bring a good balance of nutrients to the table so that you know what you were having was good for you and your family.”

Her top tips are to focus on vegetables, fruit, seeds and nuts in your diet. “Whatever comes directly from the soil brings a lot of micronutrients with it. You need leafy greens in particular and a broad variety of colour to get the full range of micronutrients. Balance that with a nice bit of protein and then good quality carbs – brown rice, wholemeal pasta and the likes are much more beneficial than plain white rice.”

She’s also determined to convince us that healthy cooking can be tasty. “People think a healthy meal is steamed broccoli and baked salmon with a potato on the side of the plate. It’s absolutely not like that. It’s all about flavour. There’s two things about food on the plate – it has to look good and it has to taste amazing.