Originally Posted by
Byrthnoth
If you think she'd be game and you want something that's cheap and easy, it's hard to beat roasting a chicken. Butterfly it (if you have joy of cooking, read the first few pages before the chicken recipes), rub oil on the outside, pepper, salt, and I always stick some slabs of butter under the skin for good luck. Make sure you remove the damned giblets. They all have them. Don't give up until you've found them. Cook 20min/lb at 350 degrees (so it doesn't even take long if you make a small chicken.) It's going to be a morning-of kind of thing, so you're best off going to the supermarket and buying a thawed chicken to start with.
To go with your chicken, you can make mashed potatoes. It's not hard, but does take time. Probably ~an hour, so you could make them after putting the chicken in. Scrub them down with a brush (or rub them hard with your fingers if you have no brush) and get all the knotty-wood-like stuff out using a peeler. I don't bother peeling them. It's extra work and I like skins in my mashed potatoes. Cut them into ~1inch cubes. It's important that they're all approximately the same volume, but a little variance never hurt anyone. Boil them in your largest pot (fill it with hot water from the sink to give yourself a head start). Depending which type of potato you have, the cooking time and amount of water that you should use is going to vary. You can't really go with too much water, but you can go with too little imop. You can tell when they're ready to come out like this:
* As soon as you put them in, poke one with a fork and try to feel how hard it is to pierce so you can get a feeling for later.
* When your fork pierces a potato chunk pretty easily (push it against the side of the pot), but it doesn't split apart, it's ready to come out.
** You're aiming to hit a ~5-10 minute window of "okay, that would probably work" here. It's not some precise 30 second window that you have to hit or your potatoes are going to taste like ass.
I'm too lazy to use a strainer, so instead of taking them out I put the lid on the pot and tilt it over the sink to get the water out. Do NOT risk getting your hand wet, ESPECIALLY if you're wearing an oven mitt. You'll scald that shit and your lunch date will turn into an ER visit. Maybe just use a strainer. Anyway, get it relatively water free somehow (shouldn't see any standing water) and put butter in. A lot of butter. Like, put in half a stick (dice it up into smaller chunks so it melts faster. Wait until it's pretty melted, and then go after the potato/butter mixture with your handheld mixer. The potatoes are not going to whip up and look creamy yet (probably), but they will break apart which is what you want. Next add a dash of milk, beat some more, add a dash of milk, beat some more, etc. until they look about how you want. Put as much salt and pepper in as you want. I go heavy on the pepper and medium/light on the salt, personally. If you think it needs more butter, add more butter. Amount of butter is directly proportional to how good it tastes, but you don't want it leaving an obvious butter spot on any plates. I have gone down that road before, and the reactions were "that tasted awesome!" mixed with "oh man, I can't believe I ate that."
If you think that looks like too much effort to her (although you'd probably only spend an hour actually cooking it) and want to come off as nonchalant "Oh, you're hungry? I'll go make something." It might be better to do something like a salad with a homemade salad dressing. Depends on the girl, but some chicks would be majorly impressed if you had enough fresh produce in the house to make a real salad (fresh tomato, fresh lettuce or spinach, maybe some cucumber if you want), and then had enough nuts and crap to put on it that it gains some caloric value but still looks healthy. Almond slices are cheap and craisins are another good option and both keep well. If you can't find slices or something, you can take whole nuts and put them in a plastic bag wrapped in a paper towel, then crush them with something hard. This is not going to be a pasta-cheap route if you are not the type of guy to keep fresh produce around, but it'll still come out cheaper than going to a restaurant probably.
Typical vinaigrette is 3 parts oil, 1 part vinegar. Make about a cup, and add a teaspoon of lemon juice. Add a dash of salt/pepper (people would say "to taste" here, which means it's really just arbitrary. Add as much or as little as you want). Put it in a sealed container and shake the shit out of it. Taste it, see if you need to add anything. If you want a sweet vinaigrette and you have some weird vinegar (maybe strawberry vinegar, for instance), use that and put like a tablespoon of sugar in it. If you were going to make this along with the above two things, there's plenty of time while the potatoes boil and chicken cooks. It would be ~2 hours from "I have all the ingredients" to finish. I do it in as little as an hour depending how small a chicken I have, so I'm leaving you some leeway when I say 2 hours.
The above combination of recipes is my "comfort food" recipe. If my girlfriend is angry at me, I combine it with the cake recipe on the back of the Hershey's Dark Chocolate cocoa powder box and let that cook while we eat dinner.
You probably want to come off as someone who is competent in the kitchen and eats well, but not the type of wussy sissy man that cooks all the time. If you're starting a potentially long-term relationship, it's important to avoid building expectations that you have no intention of fulfilling in the long run. If you're looking for a one-night stand, whatever.
I'd vote for just a solid salad either way. Light lunches are socially acceptable, it's easy as crap, people find it impressive that you bother buying produce regularly enough to have it fresh, and it's under $20. Salads are also one of the few things that people find impressive but require almost no cooking experience. You want a salad that tastes good? Look at a picture of a good salad and make your plate look like that. Other things, (Chicken, mashed potatoes, cake) are things that you might mess up once or twice before getting a feeling for it. Heck, I'm still discovering new ways to mess up mashed potatoes and I've been making that recipe for years.
If you want to play it up even further and live in a city, google for farmers markets nearby. I've yet to be in a city that doesn't have at least one Saturday morning farmers market this time of year, and you can pick up fresh tomatoes with all the adjectives attached to them that you want (ORGANIC GREEN LOCAL FREERANGE TOMATOES). Fresh tomatoes are awesome.