Pampered Chef Magic

I wish that I could adequately explain to you the horror I feel concerning multi-level marketing. Marketing in general scares the daylights out of me, but asking your friends for money, and preying upon their friendship to request money, makes me squeamish in a way that very few things do. Unfortunately, because of this, I am particularly susceptible to marketing, multi-level marketing, and am likely to preserve friendships by showing up at parties when I would rather be almost anywhere else. It is all very convoluted.

 

I have a friend whom I’ll call Jenny, and for about the last eight months she has relentlessly invited me to Pampered Chef parties at her house. I haven’t the foggiest interest in Pampered Chef: I’m twenty five, I live with my parents, and we have a well-stocked kitchen. That’s what I should tell her when she asks me. It would be so simple. But I never do that. I just make up excuses (of which there are plenty of good ones, thankfully) and she seems to regard me as a social butterfly and admire my continual lack of availability as an indication of social standing, which only makes her more zealous in pursuing me to attend her parties. It’s a vicious cycle. Finally, a few weeks or months ago, she came to my office and cornered me in such a way, and at such a time, that I could not offer a single excuse, and therefore agreed to go to her party. Two days ago, she called me up, giggly, to remind me “about Monday!” I had totally forgotten the party, had other events tentatively scheduled (funny, right?), and my car is currently in the shop, so I am driving a borrowed mini-van that is basically NOT MINI AT ALL, and who wants to roll up to a Pampered Chef Party with a borrowed car, making it look like you borrowed a soccer-mom van JUST TO FIT IN AT THE PARTY??

Laaaaaame.

It was just.....I am SUCH a hermit that I was so not thrilled about going. That’s all there is to it.

 

BUT.

As it turns out.

IT WAS A MAGIC SHOW.

 

I went through the catalog immediately and flagged a few pages where there were cheap, non-bulky items my mother wouldn’t mind introduced into her kitchen. Meanwhile, the hostess began to address us, while shoving pizza dip at us.

PIZZA DIP.

Like liquid pizza, I am not even kidding.

 

She was a formidable, bejeweled manifestation of a “Pampered Chef Consultant,” was wearing numerous diamonds and bracelets apparently to show off her lucrative commission checks, she made endless jokes about her own weight (which has got to be among the surest ways of making everybody awkward), and she showed us various important items that we would never use in our real lives. Meanwhile, Jenny’s million cats were around me creeping me out by scratching the couches from the inside out, and I felt like the room was claustrophobic and snobbish. Too, I think it was a throwback to my childhood, when my mother was invited to a Tupperware party. We were legitimately poor and my mom bought six small cups, and I felt like everybody looked down on her because she just bought six plastic cups. (We still use the cups to this day; they are about twenty years old.) There are few things that make me angrier than one of my mother’s so-called “friends” acting in such a way that makes her cry. She is a beautiful, thoughtless, unselfish woman who is diligent and has a good spirit, and when someone makes her cry I always feel helpless, and particularly helpless when I was young. Around the time that the room was closing in on me, the Consultant began a miraculous show by pulling out sundry overpriced cranberry-colored stoneware and walking over to the microwave.

“Do you want to see a TRICK?” she asked.

NOOOOO, GET ME OUT OF HERE!

“SEE?” she said, popping a large raw chicken into the pot and sprinkling it with herbes de provence. “SEE?” She covered the pot, with only the chicken and the herbes de provence inside, threw it in the microwave, and proceeded to talk about her commissions and sales until she opened the door, whipped the lid off the pot triumphantly, and presented to us a roasted chicken, as though it was fresh from the rotisserie at Costco.

 

It was exactly like a magic show in Vegas, only instead of making live birds appear out of a hat, it was a very-much-deceased bird in a clay pot, and we were all digging our forks into it.

 

IT WAS SO MACABRE YOU HAVE NO IDEA, naturally, but it was SOOOO delicious too, which is basically unfair, and it was the finest chicken I had tasted in a very long time. I thought: My mother would love that pot, and we would eat chicken-and-herbes-de-provence twice a week!

 

It was the finest Pampered Chef Party anybody has ever been to. I purchased four things: a microwave rice-cooker, a microwave vegetable cooker, a mini muffin pastry shaper, and herbes de provence.

 

In conclusion: I AM GOING TO SCOUR eBAY THE INSTANT I GET HOME BECAUSE THERE IS NO WAY I AM PAYING EIGHTY DOLLARS, EVEN FOR A MIRACLE POT.

But boy, was that chicken delish.