Cindi Leive - 100 Recipes Every Woman Should Know: Engagement Chicken and 99 Other Fabulous Dishes to Get You Everything You Want in Life

For any woman
who wants to stir the pot
in the kitchen, in love, and in life.

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W ould you believe me if I told you that food can get you everything you want in life? Of course not. But it can get you close.

Thats the message of this book, and if youre rolling your eyes at the idea, well, I was right there with youuntil Engagement Chicken persuaded me otherwise. This magical little dish, whose wonderful and romantic story is chronicled in these pages, is responsible for more than 60 engagements so far, and it has turned me into a believer. Not just in the power of a simple roast chicken to make men drop to their knees and propose, but in the power of what we make, and what we eat, to change our moods, our fates, and even, yes, our lives.

Like a lot of women these days, I never really learned to cook. Sure, my mom did it, and very well (flank steak with broccoli was a masterpiece in her hands); and my stepmother, born in Switzerland, is one of the most effortlessly elegant home chefs I know, the kind of woman who can take four eggs and a hunk of cheese and turn it into a fine-dining experience. But growing up, I had more important things to spend my time on. Boys, clothes, plotting my brilliant careerall of it seemed more compelling than anything that might happen in the kitchen.

How naive I was. Only as an adult did I realizeafter a few years of trying to subsist on takeoutthat cooking is one of lifes great pleasures. Even in my shoebox-size apartment, I discovered that chopping and stirring and mixing and mashing could dissolve all my daily stresses, and the results seemed to work some strange hocus-pocus on the people around me as well. You know the drill: Serve your recently cheated-on best friend homemade muffins and shell cryand then realize that she deserves a guy who will take at least as good care of her as you do. Bring the leftover muffins to the office and even Scrooge in the next cubicle will suddenly be verrry, verrry nice. Not that I was instantly good at cooking (it took me far too long to figure out that if you heat the oil too high for the stir-fry, the fire alarm will go off, and your cranky super will come yell at you). But I liked it, and other people liked it, and I wished Id spent more time hovering round the stove as a teen, taking notes.

So I turned to cookbooksand, specifically, to Glamour magazines last cookbook, Glamours Gourmet on the Run , a working-girl bible that offered simple but satisfying recipes for what was then a new generation of time-pressed women. New books were verboten on my starter salary, but I picked up GOTR used, and it served me well: The no-cook turkey tonnato charmed the hard-to-charm bridal party of my oldest friend; the filet mignon made a boyfriend Id offended feel very made-up-to (so much so that we now have two kids); and the pasta-dinner chart page still has my happy tomato splatters on it (weve updated it for you here on page 167).

Today, as the editor of Glamour , Im very pleased that recipes are a staple of the magazine. Our 12 million readers tell us that they cook for all kinds of reasons: because they love it; because theyre trying to eat healthfully; because its so much more affordable than eating out. But many also cook, as I came to, just to see what happens. And sometimes what happens is life-changing. About seven years ago, as youll read here, we published a recipe for a delicious lemon-infused roast chickena recipe one of our own editors had developed, and one of our own staffers had gotten engaged after making. What happened next was a little bit miraculous, and it convinced me that food gets stuff done .

Or maybe its better to say that you get stuff done, but food helps. This book, like every recipe that Glamour publishes, is written with your crazy life in mind: your schedule (busy), your tastes (diverse), and your kitchen (not staffed with a sous-chef). In the capable hands of cookbook editor Veronica Chambers, every set of instructions was tested by both accomplished home chefs and women who say they dont cook, so whatever your kitchen skills, youre covered.

You may be buying this book strictly for the Engagement Chicken and its yummy brand of marital magic. My heart and hopes are with you. But its just as likely youre not that into chicken, or you dont want to get engaged, or youve already wooed the partner of your dreams. Thats fine too. You do want somethingprobably lots of somethingsout of life. I hope this cookbook helps you get it all, and then some.

Cindi Leive

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF , Glamour

O nce upon a time, there was a young magazine assistant who loved her boyfriend and imagined that someday in the not too distant future they would get married. One evening, in the kind of flurry of domesticity that even the most modern young woman can experience, she made her boyfriend a classic roast chicken supper, based on a recipe her boss, a Glamour editor, had given her. Her boyfriend loved it. He had seconds. He licked his fingers. And shortly thereafter, he proposed.

Relationships are complicated. Cooking comes with instructions.

MELROSE PLACE

Naturally, she was overjoyed, and word of her success in the kitchen quickly spread around the office. Recipe tips were shared. Roasting pans were purchased. And, as the staff watched in amazement, three assistants in the Glamour fashion department were, in short order, engaged.

Just like that, Engagement Chicken was born.

A word about that chicken: It was fabulously simple. Kimberly Bonnell, the then- Glamour editor and avid cook whod developed the recipe, had traveled to Italy and remembered loving the simple roast chicken she ate there because it captured the real essence of Italian cooking, which was that you did as little as possible to the food. Her recipe, adapted from one by Marcella Hazan, included several tips that made good cooking sense: puncturing the lemons before stuffing them into the chicken so that the deep citrus flavors infused the meat; covering the skin with lemon juice and salt so that it became super-crispy; and most importantly, turning the chicken midway through cooking so that the breast meat, which can get so annoyingly dry in some recipes, stayed just as juicy as the dark pieces. It cooked up impressively, but, notes Bonnell, was a great recipe for someone whos nervous about being in the kitchen or hasnt cooked a lot. Its really easy to make. Lets not forget about the cooks needs when were thinking about the guys needs!

engagement
CHICKEN
success story

JENNIFER VALE
&
CHRIS GREEN
ST. LOUIS, MO

CHICKEN DATE:
February 14, 2006

ENGAGEMENT DATE:
March 23, 2006

On her first Valentines Day with boyfriend Chris, then thirty-onea sweet neighbor whod wooed her for years by opening doors for her and carrying her shopping bags Glamour reader Jennifer, then thirty-six, decided to make Engagement Chicken. (She swears it wasnt all about the ring; she also just thought it sounded tasty.) Chris kept talking about how hard the recipe must have been, and I went along for kicks, but really it was so simple, she says. A little more than a month later, on vacation in the Smoky Mountains, Chris got down on one knee in the middle of a snow-covered trail and proposed. When they married the next year, Jennifer made a toast: If anyone is looking for ideas, she told the crowd, make that chicken!

But back to the weddings. As it turned out, those first three engagements were only the tip of the chicken iceberg. In 2004, Glamour published the recipe in the magazine. Almost immediately, the letters started pouring in: