It started with the tapenade. This olive-based relish served on very thin slices of crisp, homemade toast became breakfast instead of doughnuts and coffee.

It's a metaphor for how cancer changes a life but doesn't have to destroy every enjoyment.

It was January 2000, and Madeleine McKay had just learned that her husband, novelist, artist, journalist, playwright and sometime TV actor (the 1950s series "Adventures in Paradise") Gardner McKay, had an extremely virulent form of prostate cancer. He was told he had only a short time to live, though he survived for almost two more years, continuing his writing and attempting to retain his considerable joie de vivre.

He would rise early, retire to his one-room writing cottage separate from their Koko Head home, work through the day with stops for breakfast, perhaps a short kayak workout (which generally ended at a local coffee shop), work again for a couple of hours, then lunch, more work and a lavish dinner with wine, his beloved wife and perhaps some friends. Meanwhile, Madeleine McKay would be in her studio, painting; she produces gorgeous still-lifes, often of food, and her work will decorate her book when it is published.

"He was a gourmand," said Madeleine McKay, "He loved to eat." And having lived all over the world, he loved many kinds of foods: Mediterranean-style meals, French country food, and dishes he grew to love while living in the Canary Islands for a time. Like many men, he has a preference for every fatty thing: beef and lamb, butter and cream, especially ice cream.

But Madeleine McKay was learning that these very things may, according to burgeoning research, encourage and nurture cancer cells.

Speaking quietly, and with a somewhat far-away look, McKay (who has since remarried, to Hawai'i Public Radio president and general manager Michael Titterton) recalls that the first thing she and Gardner McKay did, in the despairing hours after they got the diagnosis, was sit in the living room looking at each other, stunned. And then they shared a bottle of champagne and began to laugh and "get a bit silly." Because what can you do?

But there were things to do. They sought out the best treatment they could find, here and in Los Angeles. They began a naturopathic herbal regimen. They practiced visualization, picturing the cancerous cells being destroyed. They attempted to get into clinical trials for new therapies.

Meanwhile, Gardner McKay fought in his studio, working through the misery of radiation and chemotherapy to complete two writing projects. "Now," he told Madeleine, "I'm really on a deadline."

And Madeleine McKay fought in the kitchen.

Because she had trained at Cordon Bleu and with former Honolulu baking maven Lavonne Tollerud, and, before marrying McKay in 1983, co-owned a very large Honolulu catering operation, and because they entertained often, she knew cooking.

Her first instinct was to turn to food as both healer and palliative.

She began immediately to research the effects of nutrition on cancer, which convinced her that animal fats and even certain vegetable fats (such as corn and safflower oil) feed cancer. She talked to other cancer survivors and found that most had turned to at least a semi-vegetarian diet, based mainly on vegetable proteins (beans and such), fruits and vegetables, and fish (but not farm-raised fish).

All the books she could find on cooking for cancer patients were focused on "building them up," with recipes focused on animal foods and fatty ingredients. It was almost, she thinks now, as though they were saying, "Oh, let them eat what they want. They're going to die anyway." She wasn't buying that.

And so she began to study her considerable recipe collection, working to change their diet — cutting out animal foods, most fats except a few oils, refined carbohydrates, cane and beet sugars — without destroying her husband's relish for flavor. "I felt that by reworking the recipes he had known and loved ... I could make the meals so interesting he wouldn't notice," she said. And for a long time, he didn't.

She devised what she hoped would be a cancer-fighting diet, loading their meals with phytochemicals, such as the lycopenes in cooked tomatoes, that are believed to prevent cancer cell production or proliferation. "And he was enjoying his food without suffering."

The result, seven years after his death, is a manuscript, not yet published but in the hands of a literary agent now, replete with ideas for people living with cancer and the cooks who love them.

The book not only offers recipes of the sunny flavored and sometimes spicy type that Gardner McKay loved, but ideas on techniques for helping cancer sufferers through the side effects of therapy, lists of tools that can make the work easier for the caretaker and some classic techniques she used to produce staple ingredients that helped her to put meals together quickly.

Among her favorite tools: