BRAINY BITES
GIVE YOUR PALATE A PhD IN PERFECTION
Their taste in food could not be more different: Tina Landsman Abbey prefers sweet and rich, while Gail Goldfarb Karp likes crunchy and tart. Karp likes the white meat of chicken; Abbey finds white meat too dry. She likes her meat rare; Karp does not. “If I see blood, I am not happy,” she said.
The list goes on. But what the Montreal women have in common is a passion for food and for the process of creating recipes and perfecting them. And that made them ideal co-editors of a new cookbook, The Smart Palate: Delicious Recipes For a Healthy Lifestyle (McGill-Queen’s University Press).
Although their food preferences are divergent, each has a deep respect for the views and knowledge of the other and they worked well together. It helped also that the two women, both 56, have known each other for a lifetime and each was comfortable enough with the other that she could say what she really meant. “We were a great team,” said Karp.
The book, a fundraiser for the Rosalind and Morris Goodman Cancer Research Centre at McGill University, features more than 180 recipes, with colour photos of every dish.
“Food can be considered a type of medicine ... it affects everything from your mood to your energy level to how you react to stress: What we put into our bodies is potentially so powerful,” Karp said.
Recipes in The Smart Palate are accompanied by a nutritional analysis; dietitians Cindy Bassel Brown and Sharyn Katsof worked with the cooks, and recipes “were scrutinized and reworked to maximize nutrition without compromising on flavour,” they write. “Our work together validates our belief that heathy eating does not have to be complicated or compromising.”
The book features a chapter on breakfast, which is an often neglected or overlooked meal. The fish chapter includes such flavourful dishes as halibut with grilled pepper anchovy relish, spinach-and-dill-stuffed salmon, buckwheat-coated black cod and ginger-steamed fish. Dessert recipes are bright and good without being rich or cloying.
Dishes like wheat berries with cranberries and pecans, quinoa with mushrooms and chickpeas (see recipe) and lentil and barley citrus salad are wholesome and sustaining, particularly during these dark winter months.