Engaging Meals

If the New York Daily News is correct, today's urban male apparently isn't just looking for smart, sexy and a sense of humor - but he's also seeking a woman with a great lasagna recipe:

Lasagna...brought luck for Diane DiMeo, a fact that still surprises her husband. "I thought, 'What does a Korean-Iranian girl know about cooking Italian?'" says Joe DiMeo, a Brooklyn native who grew up on his Neapolitan grandmother's classic food. Diane's vegetarian lasagna - with roasted tomatoes, spinach, pine nuts and raisins - was not like Nonna's.

"I loved the quirkiness of it," says Joe. "She showed me that there was something else out there. She got me through my stomach." He'd known her for only a week. Two weeks after that, he gave her the key to his apartment. And three weeks later, they wed. Now they now run the restaurant Soju in Brooklyn Heights. "In the past three years I've eaten like a king," says Joe, who reports that Diane makes her lasagna once a month.

Other examples of culinary rapture leading to wedlock, include a Manhattan exercise physiologist's fowl play and a beauty magazine editor's tartish behavior.

Who says that the way into a man's heart isn't through his stomach?