An Israeli mother - and restaurateur - shares her love of food from the eastern Mediterranean and beyond with a range of delicious recipes from her kitchen.
Yael Shochat (Author)
Cooking has always been the focus of my life. I grew up in the
Israeli portside city of Haifa, eating fresh local market foods at
home and at the local Arabic and Jewish restaurants. My
introduction to the kitchen, like a lot of other kids, was helping
my mum make cakes and getting to lick the bowl. Then I started
cooking in my early teens, and have felt at home in the kitchen
ever since.
When I left Israel to study in the UK, it really dawned on me just
how important good food is - how great food can lift your spirit
and make you happy, and is central to not only special celebrations
but your everyday rituals and home life. Israeli food is a vibrant
and distinctive combination of Mediterranean, North African,
European, and Middle Eastern, and when I came to New Zealand in
late 1997 with a young family, the food I loved was very hard to
find. I missed it terribly, and so I opened the Lunch Box on
Shortland Street, which expanded to become Ima Cuisine on Fort
Street.
Ima (pronounced eema) means mother in Hebrew. My food is fresh,
honest, healthy and nurturing, and the restaurant atmosphere is
warm and casual. We aim to make our guests feel immediately
comfortable and at home, and with the Ima cookbook I hope that some
of my favourite dishes will become your home favourites too.
David Cohen (Author)
David Cohen is a Wellington-based writer and journalist whose work
has appeared frequently in publications in New Zealand and abroad.
An anthology, Greatest Hits- A Quarter Century of Journalistic
Encounters, Cultural Fulminations and Notes on Lost Cities, was
published in 2014. The English writer Julie Burchill hailed the
collection as 'a brilliant album'. The New Zealand Herald described
it as 'fearless'.
Cohen's experience as a food critic and his longstanding interest
in Jewish subjects (he contributed a chapter to Jewish Lives In New
Zealand published by Godwit) led him to collaborate with the
Auckland restaurateur Yael Shochat on Ima Cuisine- An Israeli
Mother's Kitchen (2016).
Cohen's work has often been prompted by personal experiences and
circumstances. A Perfect World is a combined family memoir and
investigative journalism on the subject of autism, based on his
experience as the father of an autistic son; while Little Criminals
uses Epuni Boys' Home as a basis to study New Zealand's
now-scandalous residential juvenile criminal system of the 1950s to
1980s. The book would provide the basis for a documentary of the
same name.
Roy Richard Grinker, a professor of anthropology at George
Washington University and the author of Unstrange Minds- Remapping
the World of Autism, has praised Cohen for his 'erudition and
literary elegance', calling him a 'gifted writer' who 'moves so
gracefully across narratives, scientific discourses, artistic
genres, historical periods and continents that you hardly notice
the full force of his prose until the conclusion when, suddenly, it
hits you- Cohen has made us see autism as an essential part of the
human condition.'
Man Booker Prize short lister Lloyd Jones wrote of Little
Criminals- 'David Cohen has taken an important piece of social
history and unpacked it in a highly imaginative way. It is
completely engrossing.'
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