Recipe for a Delicious Life: Discover the Perfect Blend of Food & Music to Stimulate

Chapter One

A Taste for Adventure, a Zest for Life

LIKE ANY CHEF, I am always glad to know that my food has been appreciated. Celebrity clients have come into the kitchen to thank me in person, or brought me into their dining room at the end of private meals I have catered to introduce me to their guests. That has been gratifying—and has often led to more business from people in attendance who asked for my card.

I have always been thankful for these small moments of gratitude. But there was one time when I squirmed—as thousands of people clapped and cheered.

It came during the couple of years I toured with The Kelly Family as their private chef. Comprising ten siblings who sang and played a wide range of instruments, this American-Irish family band was especially popular in Europe, touring in a big old double-decker bus and performing sell-out concerts in stadiums and other large venues.

I was excited to learn recently that several of the original band members have reformed The Kelly Family and are touring in Europe again after a break of many years. I’m hoping to have the opportunity to see them perform in their new show. It would be fun to catch up with them and recall some of our adventures together. Through the two years I worked with the band, I became a part of the extended family, not only preparing all their food but also dispensing words of comfort and encouragement whenever needed. Their mother had passed away, so in some ways I became something of a surrogate mom to them. I’d greet them with hugs when they came off stage after a show, telling them how well they had done, handing out towels and robes so they could wipe the sweat off and keep warm.

This wasn’t one of my official responsibilities, but I saw it as part of caring for them as whole persons. My main job was to provide lunch, dinner before their evening show, and then something light for them after the performance. As you might imagine, that didn’t leave me with a lot of down time.

However, on occasions I could take a short break during their performance. I never got tired of hearing them play, so I’d stand to the side of the stage to enjoy their music, or occasionally make my way down in front, with the rest of the audience.

That is where I was standing one night during a concert in Germany when one of them spotted me in the crowd. I am not sure how they saw me—I’m only 5 ft., 1 in. tall. Maybe I stood out because I still had my white chef’s jacket on.

Anyway, the next thing I knew, between songs I was being summoned to join them on stage. Reluctantly I made my way through the crowd and around to the steps and up onto the stage, where the band introduced me, telling everyone how much they loved me, my food, and how well I looked after them.

All the applause was a little embarrassing, but it did remind me how I had first fallen in love with providing people with good food, many years before.

Seasoned With Obligation

I didn’t discover how satisfying good food can be, physically and emotionally, until I was about eight years old. Growing up in Hadera, a small community between Haifa and Tel Aviv, on Israel’s Mediterranean coast, I didn’t look forward to family meal times.

Being together with my parents and two siblings was fine, but the food was another story. Though we lived on a small farm that produced beautiful fresh vegetables we sold in the grocery store my mother ran, she served heavy and often sweetened dishes from Eastern Europe.

Both Jewish, Mom and my father had met and married in Israel after fleeing Poland and Lithuania, respectively, before World War II. Sadly, many of our relatives who stayed behind died in Hitler’s purge.

Settling in Israel before it achieved statehood, in 1948, my parents worked long hours to make a life for themselves as part of a small Zionist community. In addition to working hard, they were kind and generous. It wasn’t unusual for them to come across people who had nowhere to live and invite them to stay with us for a while. They’d feed and house them without any charge.

Dad was employed overseeing road construction while Mom managed the grocery store. She did this in addition to running the household and being the main caregiver of three children, which meant she didn’t have a lot of time or energy left for food preparation. I don’t blame my mom for her weariness in any way, but it was clear that feeding us was just another chore.

Friday nights were the worst. This was when she would prepare Gefilte fish, a traditional dish for the weekly Shabbat dinner. Though my parents were not religious, they did observe some of the traditions of the Jewish calendar.

I loathed the taste of this stuffed fish, which Mom fixed with sugar in the East European tradition. I came up with all the excuses I could for not eating it: my throat hurt, my stomach was upset, I was already full, I was so tired. But my Mom wasn’t stupid. She gave me increasingly smaller portions as time went by.

Some cooks ruin meals by over-salting everything. In my mother’s case, it seemed like her meals were spoiled by a heavy seasoning of obligation.

It would be years before I realized that it was her absence of interest in or enthusiasm for what my mom was doing in the kitchen which was the missing ingredient that made everything taste so bad to me. Some cooks ruin meals by over-salting everything. In my mother’s case, it seemed like her meals were spoiled by a heavy seasoning of obligation.

There were a couple of exceptions. She could make a delicious dessert on occasions, and her tagine, a Moroccan-style stew, was quite delicious. But these treats were all too rare. As a result, I was quite skinny. Some people might even have considered me to be malnourished.

One way I was able to keep from starving was by going to get the fresh black bread we bought each morning from a nearby bakery. Still warm from the oven, it was so tasty that I would usually eat a good portion of one of the two loaves before I got back to the house.

At some stage, I discovered there were other things close to hand that could satisfy my appetite. We grew all sorts of vegetables and fruit in the fields and trees around our home: apples, apricots, avocados, carrots, cucumbers, mangoes, mushrooms, persimmon, and tomatoes. We also had a chicken coop and the geese, turkeys, and goats we owned all ran wild.

Whenever I wanted a fresh, tasty carrot or tomato, or an apple or pear, I could help myself by picking up one from the ground or plucking the ripest fruit from one of the trees. It was the juiciest treat you can image! On occasion, I would also take a freshly laid egg, crack the shell, and drink down the raw yolk and white. Delicious.

Trial and Error

In time, I experimented with all this readily available fresh food. I’d carefully layer pieces of the lettuce greens and arrange them with different vegetables on top, creating a salad on my plate so the colors sat well together and the different textures and shapes looked pleasing to my keen artistic eye. It made me happy to admire my new creations and eating them was so much more enjoyable.

My brother, Yoram, and my cousins Shoshana and Abraham noticed what I was doing in the kitchen. They started asking me to prepare some of my salads for them, which I did gladly. In a busy household, it was nice to hear words of affirmation.

Their appreciation made me feel warm and full inside, just like the fresh bread from the bakery. I didn’t make the connection back then, but it was the first time I experienced giving and receiving love and affection through the preparing and sharing of food. I didn’t realize this would become the driving passion of my life.

I had already learned that cooking can involve some trial and error, however. At the age of five or so, I had decided to help my mother with one of her meals.

Though we were not orthodox Jews, Mom sent our chickens to the shochet, the kosher butcher. He would butcher one and leave it on our kitchen counter. Mom would later put the chicken in a pressure cooker, to save preparation time.

Well, when I saw the chicken on the side there one day, back from the shochet and ready to be cooked, I decided that I would ease Mom’s burden. I stuffed the bird into the pot just as it was—oblivious that it had not been cleaned or plucked.

Not knowing how long to let it cook, I decided after a while that it must surely be done. But I didn’t know how to release the pressure from the pot, and the lid would not budge. Finally, I got my father’s hammer and with a big swing knocked the lid off.

It spun away like a flying saucer, smashing through the sliding glass door and into the backyard. Thankfully, I was unharmed. But the chicken shot straight up into the air where, by force of the tremendous impact, it stuck to the ceiling.

Something of a cleanliness freak, my mom kept the glass of the sliding door so spotless that when she came home that evening she didn’t notice right away that it was missing. Then she felt the breeze from the outdoors. Looking up, she saw the chicken still pasted to the ceiling, feathers and all. Fortunately, she could only look at me and laugh.

Meanwhile, I was making other discoveries that would weave into the way I nourished other people when I got older. With Yoram several years older than me, and my sister, another Shoshana in the family whom we called “Shosh,” six years younger, we didn’t play together much. And though I had some friends, I was often on my own.

…you can be alone without being lonely—just as you can feel alone in a crowded room…

But you can be alone without being lonely—just as you can feel alone in a crowded room—and I was quite happy with my own company for long periods of time. I had taught myself to read by the age of four or five, and would spend hours by myself in my room, with a book from my parents’ extensive library.

Every Passover, we would have a thorough house-cleaning as part of the preparation and celebration. My job was to climb a ladder and clean all the bookshelves. The only problem was that I’d often stop to pull out a book I hadn’t read, and find myself so engrossed that I would forget about the dusting. That did not make me very popular with Yoram when he was sent to see how I was getting on.

Still, to this day I’m grateful for the love of reading I developed at an early age, which has enabled me to expand my understanding of food, health, and nutrition by doing my own studying.

Learning to Leap

Around the same time that I developed a passion for books, I also began to explore music. I am not sure where this interest came from. Yoram was quite musical, learning to play the trumpet, but we didn’t listen to a lot of music in the house. We would play the radio sometimes, but Mom wanted it switched off when she came home. She’d had enough noise from being in the store all day long.

However it developed, my love of music became clear to my parents and for one of my birthdays they bought me a record player. I was thrilled. Sitting in my room with a book, I’d listen to records endlessly.

Though I was young, I was not particularly drawn to popular music. I found myself being tugged by classical recordings—first Bach and then others such as Vivaldi and Handel. In time I discovered opera, getting swept up in works such as Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. Any money I received as gifts or earned for doing chores or helping out at the store would go to buying new LPs from the record store.

Rather than playing with friends, I would sit alone in my room for hours, getting lost in the sound around me. Whatever my mood, the music could meet me there—happy, sad, lonely. I felt calm, peaceful, joyful, resting in the melodies and sweep of the music. This was as close to a religious experience as I would have.

It would be many years before I put together all those elements from my childhood in a way that touched other people’s lives. Just as the right preparation is an important dimension of a wonderful meal, I had to go through a bunch of life experiences that brought me to the right time and place.

They included mandatory service in the Israeli army, two years for women and three for men. I learned a lot during the time I served in military intelligence, including discipline, determination, independence, how to think on your feet and outside the box, and teamwork.

I also discovered what it takes to overcome fear—a lesson that came the hard way. As part of a training exercise they split up a group of us taking a leadership course, escorting half to the top of a four-story building. The others were down below, holding out a stretched army blanket onto which we had to jump.

If we didn’t go voluntarily, we were told, we would be pushed.

“Right, who wants to go first?” one of the leaders asked.

I immediately raised my hand. “I’ll do it.”

But I made a big mistake. When I got to the edge of the roof, I did the one thing the instructors had warned us not to: I looked down. In an instant, my mind told me to step away.

Everybody else in the group then took their turns to jump while I waited, ashamed of backing down. Finally only I remained. With a deep breath I stepped forward and fell to the blanket.

From that day on, I vowed to myself that I would never again let fear hold me back from stepping off the edge.

A Whole New World

The determination that came from my moment on the ledge fueled my decision to immigrate to America. After years focused on raising two boys, and the end of my marriage, I decided I wanted to make a new start for us. To be sure of getting one of the limited number of visas, I waited outside the United States Embassy in Tel Aviv, sleeping on the ground overnight to be first in line the next morning.

I was undaunted by the fact that I didn’t speak a word of English when I landed in Los Angeles, where I was going to stay for a while with Yoram and his wife, who had settled there. Call it a mix of craziness and confidence, but it paid off—though not without some amusing moments.

One of my favorite items of clothing was a brightly designed T-shirt with English script, which I’d bought back in Israel. I thought wearing it would help me fit in. When everybody smiled and laughed when I met them, I just assumed that all Americans were friendly and kind—until I was told that the T-shirt read, “Smile if you got screwed today.”

After several months, and with a better grasp of the language, I moved to Phoenix at the invitation of some new friends. Looking to get financially secure enough to bring my sons over, I took whatever work I could find, including cleaning houses.

When I cooked and invited friends over, some of them asked if I would prepare something special for birthday parties or other events they were holding. Encouraged by this new interest in my cooking, when some of my housecleaning clients asked me to help tidy up before or after events, I would tell them that I could cater, as well.

Bit by bit word got around, and over time I began to build up quite a successful little business, Zipora Catering. In addition to providing food for private events, I got some corporate clients, and started delivering lunches to businesses.

Almost before I knew it, I was leasing space in a commercial kitchen to handle everything, with several employees. Life was good. My boys were with me now, and I was doing what I loved and getting paid for it.

A few years later, an old friend contacted me. She and her husband had moved to LA, and they invited me to stay with them and see whether I might find work there. The city always reminded me of my childhood near the ocean. As much as I enjoyed living in Arizona, I missed the greenery I had grown up around on the Israeli coast.

Something in my gut told me to jump off again. Doing so set off a fast-moving chain of events that opened up a whole new world to me.

Within a few months I had sold my business in Phoenix and gone west. A couple of days before heading out to LA, I visited a friend who was a psychic. She told me that I was going to be very successful, that I would work with celebrities and travel the world.

She also told me she was going to connect me with one of her phone clients. This woman lived in Los Angeles and had been the private chef to one of Hollywood’s biggest A-List couples. Maybe she could help connect me with some clients.

I hadn’t been thinking about working with show business people, but I welcomed the introduction that could lead to some income. On my first day in Los Angeles I met this friend-of-a-friend for dinner. We hit it off, and she told me of a gentleman she knew, named Chris, who was opening a new chef agency. Apparently there was a big market in Los Angeles for private chefs, not only among those in the entertainment industry but also in other high-net-worth circles.

When Chris and I met the following morning, he told me his agency was so new that he didn’t even have business cards printed yet. Clearly, he was a newcomer to this type of catering, so I was honest with him about my own experience.

“Look, I’m self-taught,” I said, telling him about my passion for helping others live healthier lives because of what they ate and how that made them feel. I told him how quickly my catering business had grown in Phoenix, and shared some of the testimonials from satisfied clients.

“I can’t make any promises,” he said as we finished our meeting. “But I will keep you in mind. The phone can ring at any time.”

Mine did a little later the same day. It was Chris. Someone had called with an opening.

And that was how, on my third day in Los Angeles, I found myself on Bob Hope’s doorstep.