The One Where We Talk About the Food

Seeing as we have been on family vacations for the last four weeks, our opportunities to meet eligible bachelors have been relatively limited. Long Island Tea fish bowl races with the 'rents, parties where we are relegated to the kids' table, and Renaissance Fairs with the relatives, albeit quite entertaining, don't exactly make for ideal conditions to prowl.

In keeping in the same vein, we decided to spend Monday evening doing quite the same: creating an anti-male environment by hosting a cleaning product party. This is similar to a Tupperware party, a jewelry party, or a naughty toy party, except these products clean toilets. Essentially, it is an excuse to get a group of friends together, eat good food, and drink a lot. As glamorous as that may sound, it's a horrible men-meeting arena.

While we could bore you to tears - or exploit the inherent humor in hosting a cleaning party - we are going to instead take this opportunity to actually talk about the food we prepared. Coincidentally and due to popular demand, we will now start linking our recipes to our blog. However, after multiple mojitos and two bottles of wine, this will not be happening tonight. In the meantime, though, you can find most of these recipes by typing key phrases into Google. Stay tuned.

Last night, somewhere in the middle of consuming an entire bottle of rum (intended to "test out" the mojito recipe for tonight- hey, practice makes perfect) followed by a bottle of cheap Chardonnay (intended for the party tonight), we decided our menu should be Cuban inspired due to our newfound love of rum and our new kitchen toy, the muddler.

And then we promptly nixed that idea and moved into the other hemisphere with an Asian-themed menu: spring rolls, edamame, peach salsa (yes, we realize this does not fit in anywhere, but one of us, for whatever reason, was really attached to this recipe), and crab rangoon pizza.

Look at these beautiful spring rolls, stuffed to the carelessly-sealed seams with tofu, rice noodles, avocado, carrots, cucumbers, green onions, and basil. We served these with a delicious spicy peanut sauce but were too lazy to take a picture of it.

We tried to mimic the edamame appetizer from one of our favorite restaurants (that we refuse to name until they decide to advertise on our page, which is highly unlikely until we solicit their sponsorship). Because there were no men at the party, we decided to spice things up a bit by liberally dousing the dish with some heat and enhancing our men repellant for a few days until we sweat out the ginger. We promise it tastes better than it looks - at least we assume that's the case...turns out neither of us tried it.

Clearly we are not food stylists or photographers by any stretch of the imagination since this looks like we poured salsa out of a jar or made a chunky tomato soup. However, this peach salsa delicacy required three ingredients (THREE, people!) and was quite challenging - there was, after all, a knife involved.

This evening's main course was another recipe that we shamelessly ripped off from another of our favorite restaurants: crab rangoon pizza. As if crab rangoon weren't unhealthy enough with the massive amounts of cream cheese and mayonnaise, we had to take the filling and spread it all over a piece of bread and douse it with mozzarella cheese and sweet chili sauce. This is the ultimate "I give up" recipe: why don't we just coat ourselves in Crisco and nominate ourselves as the targets in a greased-pig contest? We'd wave the white flag, but it's coated in lard and too heavy to hoist up the pole. Suey!