You Have to Confront the Duck!*

Before we discuss our amazing meal tonight, we must first describe the Thursday night adventure of our Broke 'n Single lives. After all, it's far more interesting than the cooking.

The night started with two gentlemen requesting our presence at a fine drinking establishment. As we were pulling into the parking lot, we received a message that our two prospectives had retired for the evening. However, since we had already put on make-up, we decided to enter the bar, risking life and limb for warm beer in a plastic cup. Upon entering the tavern, we immediately saw our two callers seemingly "calling on" two other girls...ladies...women...geriatrics. Because we left our switchblades in our other purses, we decided not to confront the situation at hand and instead located ourselves in the corner booth where we could spy without being seen. (Avoidance is our preferred defense mechanism, and our middle names are "passive" and "aggressive.")

It turns out we were only 50% correct in our assumption that we had been, in a word, ditched: one of the lads came to our table with a believable (enough) story as to why they had blatantly ignored us. So, we ordered several more beers and joined their ever-growing group of unruly friends who clearly had volume-control issues, as one of us left the bar partially deaf in one ear. It turns out, though, that the other 50% of our assumption was correct: Thing Two left the bar on his motorcycle with the two "more mature" women; we can only assume this was to ensure they took their blood pressure medication.

While one of us was engrossed in conversation with Thing One**, the other was left to fend for herself among a pack of married men and a lone single wolf who was currently unemployed and living with his parents***. In addition to warding off the verbal assaults thrown at her, she also had to block vodka-Red Bulls that were being haphazardly slid toward her across the table and then quickly taken away before she had a chance to anesthetize herself to the situation.

It doesn't take two Masters degrees to figure out whether to stay or go. You figure out what our decision was.

After the Thursday night debauchery, the next couple of days were relatively tame, as we took the time to reflect on our decision-making skills. The weekend culminated in tackling some classic Midwest recipes****. We also tried our hands at baking, and, as evidenced by our picture, the strawberry-rhubarb pie will henceforth be known as "strawberry-rhubarb swamp." Apparently we are not pastry chefs; in fact, we are not even chefs: we cook others' recipes and try to make them better and if not better, at least funnier.

*Please read in Julia Child's voice.

**She was actually trying to convince the prospective that starting an all-out bar brawl was not the solution to someone claiming he was bigger than him.

***While we exercise creative license in some - okay, most - instances, this was not one of them.

****All classic Midwest recipes call for "Cream of (insert name of food here) Soup," and our Runza casserole did not disappoint. Other common ingredients include Ranch, butter, beef/pork in some format, cheese, and anything out of a can.