Appetizer
Girls are always on a diet so you can’t go wrong with vegetables. Buy a bag of pre-made salad. Dump all of it into a fancy china and serve alongside a cute container with salad dressing.

Main Course
Keep the main course simple. Trust me, she does not need a miracle, only something edible. Know how to make pasta? Make it. If you don’t know how to cook at all, ask a female friend for help. Once she’s done giggling, she can teach you a dish you can make on your own. Or, if she’s really helpful, she will make it herself and all you have to do is stick it in the oven during crunch-time. Don’t forget to use those oven mitts. They only look silly for a minute or two – a third degree burn looks silly for a long time.

Dessert and Drinks
This is where you can impress her. Get a tiramisu or an apple pie from the bakery. Order cocktails from elsewhere but be sure to transfer the beverage into your flask. Once you whip that flask up and casually ask, “Wanna try a really great cocktail?”, she will assume you made it. What woman doesn’t love a really good cocktail and a man who can make a mean one? When the chips are down and all you can come up with is a badly burnt steak, you can count on your flask to save your date.

So you sail through the meal and she smiles at you looking happily sated. Do not take this as an invitation to tell her your life story. She need not know you got your flask from a store that sells cheap groomsmen gifts or that you once were the state’s spelling bee champion. These confessions would only ruin the moment – if a moment is, indeed, what you are having.

So there – you have no need to panic. There is a way to get through the meal with the apartment and your date unharmed. A word of advice to the wise, though – do not promise your date a five-star experience unless you can deliver. If you do and fail, the one and only action you’ll be seeing is that blur of movement she makes as she heads for the fire extinguisher.