The way to a man's heart

QUENTIN JONES/SMH

CUISINE QUEEN: Simple but effective - cookbook author Lana Vidler snared her boyfriend by making lasagne.

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If you love him, feed him. That's the opinion of the author of a new light-hearted recipe book.

Lana Vidler is a 28-year-old who has self-published the book Meals Men Love – How to Catch a Man in 3 Courses. She has concocted recipes that are "simple, wholesome home-cooked food, nothing frilly or fancy", all with a hefty dollop of humour.

Her recipe names include "Land a man lasagne", "Nana was married for 69 years because of these cookies" and "Gentlemen prefer brulee".

Her intention was to have a bit of fun and to provide good, easy, simple recipes with an onus on food men traditionally like.

"There are no tofu recipes in there," she says. "There are a thousand cookbooks out there and mostly they're by professional chefs and whenever I cooked anything from them my boyfriend always found it too fancy. I'd do something simple like a schnitzel and he couldn't stop raving about it. That's where the idea for the book came from."

The former Ascham School student works as an office manager for a homewares company and has a degree in marketing from the University of Sydney. The book's inspiration, she says, came from what she saw as a yawning gap in the market.

A year in the making, the book has 168 recipes she says she unashamedly pinched from friends, family and colleagues.

"I really researched what recipes went into it," she says, "I'd ask boyfriends what they liked to eat, male friends, even girlfriends what they cooked for their boyfriends and husbands. The book's for any woman who likes to impress a man with food. It could be your boyfriend, your husband, a mate, your dad even."

Vidler says many of her generation have lost their zeal for home cooking and prefer to eat out, while many young women simply don't cook at all.

So, for the truly hapless, the book comes with tips to ensure a successful evening at home. These include: have everything pretty much ready for when he arrives, don't forget to clean the house, set the table and don't use flimsy glassware – men hate that, apparently.

On the other side of the coin, the biggest error a man can make, Vidler says, is to fail to turn up. "That would break a girl's heart."

As a measure of her own success, Vidler says her lasagne helped woo her current boyfriend, a surgeon at Sydney Children's Hospital.

"Well, I'm sure he loved me too but the food helped a lot," she says. "He's got a tough job, stressful, with long hours, so for him to come home to a home-cooked meal, he just loved it. And I happen to think leftovers are one of the best presents a girl can give a guy . . . it's a lovely way to show you care."

Her critics could argue the idea of winning a fella's heart by fattening it up is, dare we say it, an old-fashioned one. Vidler baulks at the claim and argues she's a thoroughly modern young woman.

"When my sister heard about the book, she said, 'You'll put women back 20 years if you write that.'

"But even she's come around, she's using the book, she's cooking for her man and they recently got engaged, so I like to think the book played a small part in that."

Undeterred, she has plans for book No. 2 – a curry book for men.

Meals Men Love by Lana Vidler, $A19.95, is sold online. See mealsmenlove.com.au.

- © Fairfax NZ News