For me, this recipe tastes a little bit like my childhood, when I used to spend the summer at my grandparents’ house in the mountains of the Ligurian Apennines. There we used to have huge family gatherings outdoors, grilling food and spending a lot of quality time together. They are a quintessential dish of summer holidays!

This arugula salad with sweet potato recipe is brought to us by Diane Kochilas, an award-winning author of 18 cookbooks as well as the host, creator and producer of the PBS show “My Greek Table”. This recipe is featured in her book “Ikaria: Lessons on Food, Life, and Longevity from the Greek Island Where People Forget to Die”.

Eating Italian doesn’t have to mean giving up on your diet goals. Actually, traditional Italian food has all of the benefits of the Mediterranean Diet because that’s exactly what it is! Here are 14 of our favorite healthy Italian recipes by our Italian recipe developer, Giorgia Fontana.

My first trip to Crete, the Greek island considered to be one of the healthiest places in the world, was the beginning of my education about the true Mediterranean Diet. This island has some of the highest longevity rates in the world and the men here live to be the same age as the women.  As a matter of fact, when the first researchers went to Crete in the 1950’s they could only find one man on the island with any kind of heart disease.

After my mom died, I started overeating.  One meal in particular stands out in my memory.  My extended family and I were all at an Indian restaurant and I ordered a full meal and then started eating everyone else’s leftovers.  I was stuffing my grief.  Even before my mom died, I was struggling with my weight, but after she died I gained 20 more pounds and was the heaviest I had ever been in my life (256 pounds when I got married a year later).