The years he and his wife, Marie, spent as motivational speakers imbue his attitude. "Eat, sleep and drink with your goal. ... Be persistent. Be unstoppable." The Lenas spent more than two decades traveling the country delivering such messages before thousands of corporate and educational clients. They published a book, Being Better Than My Best (www.papalena. com/free_ebook). But like so many others, that business dried up after Sept. 11, 2001. "Two and a half years ago, Marie and I were sitting on our deck with a friend having a drink. I had just turned 50," Danny recalls. "And we were wondering what we were going to do with the second half of our lives. I said, 'Why don't we do something with grandpa's peppers?' '' Beginning in their East Village flat, the Lenas began to make the pepper snacks Danny had learned to prepare as a 10-year-old from his Calabria, Italy-born grandfather, Angelo Demarco, who had a Des Plaines farm. For years, the family had prepared what they called as special treats, first drying peppers in an outdoor shed and then cooking them according to "Papa's" secret recipe.

"I had to string vegetables all summer long," Lena recalls.

The Lenas switched from green Melrose peppers to sweet, red, ripe bell peppers and streamlined the method, substituting a convection oven for Papa's "shed-ini" and ultimately creating a patented process that results in crisp and intensely flavorful chips made from just vegetables, olive oil and spices.

A hit is launched

They launched the product at an Elmwood Park festival in 2004. When two months' production of chips sold out in an hour, they knew they had a hit.

The Lenas had a wealth of experience as entrepreneurs. Besides their motivational business, they'd run a gym, teaching kickboxing and karate (both are black belts). But they had never run a food business.

Belief in their product, says bubbly Marie Lena, has kept them going.

They worked out of their home until they couldn't stand it anymore. "We'd moved everything around. We had peppers everywhere," Marie says.

The final straw came when their little dog wandered in one day. "She had a pepper seed on the tip of her nose."

The Lenas moved to a shared rental kitchen and finally leased their own space in December 2005. It came with a vintage, 1940s Middleby-Marshall industrial oven, a wall-sized behemoth with rotating shelves. Danny thought they'd have to have it hauled away, but Marie thought they could get it working. Fearful of what might be in its long-unused hidden reaches, she even talked the repairman into lying on one of the shelves and allowing himself to be cranked around to the bottom to look.

Things went well until fall 2006, when company funds turned up missing, leaving them without enough cash even to rent a truck, according to Danny.

"Marie just kept saying, 'Let's find another way,' " Danny recalls, hugging her.

"We had one guy we paid with appliances. I gave him my big-screen TV. Marie came home and saw three guys carrying out our TV."

"You have to be humble. You have to be realistic," he says.

The hours are long. "I'm still keeping my day job," Danny says. "Marie's still keeping her day job." He is a computer tech at the College of Office Technology in Noble Square; she is a personal trainer.

In a small room dubbed the "think tank," large sheets of paper tacked to the walls detail their brainstorming and goals. The lists help them to focus, Marie says. "As soon as your attention goes off of a goal, it disappears."

So far, they've expanded their line to make chips from spicy poblano peppers, sweet potatoes and deep red beets. (For special orders, they'll apply their method to other veggies.)

Creative uses

They also found ways to use the inevitable crumbled chips. Since the chips are basically cooked vegetables, they lend themselves to all sorts of culinary uses. So the Lenas blend the beet- and pepper-chip crumbs with cheese, garlic and dairy products to make dips. The pepper chips also flavor the sauce on the thick-crusted, rectangular Sicilian pizzas the Lenas sell to heat and eat. "We make customers put their hand on the pizza and promise, 'I will not microwave this pizza!' " Marie says.

They incorporate the chips and their byproducts in giardiniera, salad dressings, pasta sauce, infused oil, caponata and even beet-chip-and-oatmeal cookies. Other family recipes go into an intense limoncello cake flavored with real lemon juice and zest and a light, fluffy coconut cake, plus a moist, low-fat, chocolate-chip banana bread that's a hit at health clubs.

The Lenas also hope to expand to other products and national distribution. But they are cautious about growth that could harm the integrity of their products and are still enjoying their personal role in the manufacturing.

"I love to get my hands in the dough," Marie says.

Papa Lena products are available at their retail shop as well as some Whole Foods, Binny's and Treasure Island stores, Sam's Wine and Spirits, Sunset Foods, Foodstuffs, Hyde Park Produce and others. Health clubs such as the East Bank Club and Lincoln Park Athletic Club and local restaurants, including Avec and Blackbird, also serve Papa Lena goods.

Call (312) 455-8100 or visit www.papalena.com.

Leah A. Zeldes is a local freelance writer.

'Mama' Lena's cake creations February 28, 2007 The vegetable chips sold by Papa Lena's may have been the impetus for the business, a legacy of Danny Lena's family. The baked goods, however, are Mama Lena's department. "I just love to bake," says Marie Lena. Marie Lena's baking career began when she and her husband were competitive bodybuilders. "Everything was low fat," she recalls. "I didn't know about Atkins. I wish I had." But people need some treats now and then, so she experimented with using bananas to replace the forbidden fats and came up with her signature banana bread, moist and filled with about five bananas per loaf.

"Danny and I had owned some health clubs at one time," she says. "What kept the doors open was this banana bread. Customers went crazy over it. We sold more banana bread than memberships." So, naturally, she added it to her roster of foods at Papa Lena's. But as tasty as it is, she's discovered, the "low-fat" label puts some people off. "It sells in the health clubs. The Lincoln Park Athletic Club can hardly keep it in stock," Lena says. "It doesn't sell here." In the store, she says, "People taste it and they say, 'It's really good,' but they don't buy it." She wonders if they'd sell more if they stopped promoting it as low fat.

Her two rich and creamy cakes, a light and fluffy coconut cake and an intensely lemony limoncello type, suffer no such image problems. "I've been making coconut cake for years, so I just started taking it around to stores," Lena says. Despite the fact that her cakes must be kept frozen, orders poured in.

Lena's limoncello-liqueur-laced cake, made with fresh lemon juice and a layer of her own lemon custard, is an even greater success.

"We always love limoncello," she says. Perfecting her recipe took six months of experimenting she says. She tried commercial lemon fillings. "They were terrible.

"So I started making my own lemon custard and lemon curd." Now she's working on making her own limoncello, too.

The cakes are very labor intensive. "I went to a food lab and asked how I could make the cakes more suitable for mass production," she says. The food scientist told her to replace the fresh-squeezed lemon juice with a reconstituted product; to trade the limoncello liqueur for lemon-flavored sugar syrup; to replace the freshly grated lemon zest with reconstituted dried peel.

He also told her to increase the shelf life with hydrogenated vegetable fats and put preservatives in it, so the cakes would not have to be kept frozen.

"I said then it would be just like anybody else's cake. It wouldn't be special."

Leah A. Zeldes