Foodie learned skills from her Baba

Adell Shneer followed a circuitous career path from the graphic design field to Canadian Living magazine’s test kitchen, where she works full time as a food specialist.

Adell Shneer

Along the way, she studied baking at George Brown College 16 years ago when she was pregnant with her third child, took a food styling course at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., and worked in food-related jobs as often as she could while raising her three children.

Serendipitously, her sister, journalist Bonny Reichert, was working for Today’s Parent magazine when they needed a recipe tester, and Shneer began her food career there. She started freelancing for Canadian Living about a decade ago.

A former resident baker and cooking teacher for Dish Cooking Studio – and a guest chef and food stylist for the Food Network’s Party Dish in 2003 and 2005 – Shneer joined Canadian Living full time four years ago.

At the magazine, she develops recipes from scratch, tests them, and is responsible for many baking-focused stories. She was also involved in developing and testing recipes for the Complete Canadian Living Baking Book published last year.

Shneer credits her late maternal grandmother – her “Baba,” Sarah Taradash – as “probably the reason I’m in food.”

Her grandmother was “an amazing cook,” recalled Shneer in an interview, leaning back comfortably in a kitchen chair  at her home, a sampling of baked goods, cheeses and Coronation grapes arrayed on the table beside her.

“Mrs. T. – that was how she was affectionately known – would make everything from scratch. Knishes, and strudel with the dough that stretched out so you could see the tablecloth through it. Varenikes. She could make anything.”

Shneer – a native of Edmonton who graduated from Edmonton Talmud Torah Hebrew Day School – also said that her father, Saul Reichert, owned two restaurants in Edmonton: Teddy’s, a deli; and Carousel, a steak house. He was in the restaurant business for more than 50 years.

“When I was small, I stood on a box and took cash in Teddy’s on Sundays.”

Even after she moved to Toronto in 1979 to study fine arts at York University, where she would meet her husband, Michael, Shneer continued to work “front of house” on her summers off.

As a student, she put together a book of her grandmother’s recipes for herself, her three sisters and their cousins, working with her to determine what measurements like “half an eggshell of oil” really meant.

Taradash, who died when Shneer was 21, worked for her son-in-law in his restaurant business, and also cooked for her family. Her culinary repertoire ranged from pickled white fish to Turkish delight strudel.

For the family, a holiday staple was “Baba’s Yom Tov Plum Pudding.” Now Shneer and her sisters gather before the holidays to bake it together.

Redolent with plums, raisins, apples and generous quantities of cinnamon and sugar, the dessert also uses a “crazy big dough” and is baked in a roaster.

Shneer has created a number of Jewish recipes, like weeknight Passover dinners, for Canadian Living, which she enjoys.

Other ideas – like a June article on “Tiny Treats” that included a recipe for French almond macaroons – derive from travel.

In France, Shneer recalls, she saw macaroons everywhere, and they were “beautiful.

“We love to travel. I think we never really got it out of our system,” said Shneer, who spent a year seeing the world with her husband before their children were born.

A self-described foodie and Twitter regular who thinks that “food inspiration is everywhere,” Shneer, a trim 48, attributes her lack of weight issues to “thoughtful” eating, “lots of” family dinners, and consistent workouts that include running and spinning.

Her recipes in Canadian Living are geared for home cooks, using readily available ingredients and easy preparation techniques.

Shneer, whose children have learned their cooking skills at her side, once wrote an article called “Cooking with Baba” about teaching children to cook.

“I really believe in getting your kids into the kitchen, and making it part of your life,” she said. “I think I was steeped in it.”