We Are All Pampered Chefs!

Today I hosted a Pampered Chef party at my house to support my best friend, Lindsey, who has recently become a consultant.  You can check out her website at http://www.pamperedchef.biz/lindseyfandrem.  And if there is anything you would like to order, just let me know . . . my party will close in a couple of days to allow for outside orders.  ;)

I really love having friends and family over for food and company, and today was no exception--with the added bonus of getting to try out really fun kitchen gadgets, dishes and cookware.  I especially liked the garlic press which allows you to put in a whole, unpeeled clove of garlic, and out comes minced garlic right into whatever you are making.  Then you just open it up and take out the garlic skin.  As someone who has spent her share of time trying her best to peel garlic, this gadget is nothing short of a miracle.

Pampered Chef has changed quite a bit since the last time I had a party (which may very well have been right after I graduated from college and was living in Salem back in 1998), and I was impressed to see how much they have expanded.  They now have stoneware baking ware (for pizzas as well as for cookies, muffins / cupcakes and bread), and really beautiful white serving dishes and platters.  They even have their own line of knives, complete with butcher block!

Lindsey brought all the fixings to make veggie pizza, carrot cake cupcake bites and turtle brownie bites.  So of course, I had to go off the diet!  :)  And it was fabulous. 

My dad came along (somewhat reticently at first), but I think he surprised himself by how much he enjoyed learning about and having the chance to use the products as we put together the food.  I had told him beforehand that I was pretty sure he would have a great time, since he is quite the cook in our family.  He ended up ordering over $100 worth of merchandise, so I guess I was right.  :)  I even teased him about becoming a Pampered Chef consultant himself, as having his own cooking-related business would both keep him busy and entertained.  Besides that, he just loves talking to anyone and everyone about something he is passionate about.  And he is quite the salesman . . . I'm sure the ladies who generally host parties would just eat him up.  He hasn't signed up yet, but I'll keep working on him. 

My mom doesn't have many contacts in the area, but my aunt does, so we asked her if she would like to co-host a party.  My mom and I will help her with it and in exchange for having it at her house, she can use the credits to order free Pampered Chef products.  And Lindsey has already booked her first show off of a show.  Not too bad.  :)

Morgan and Josie came along to help Lindsey.  Of course my mom had a great time holding Josie (babies just gravitate toward her) and Morgan and I spent a lot of time blowing and chasing bubbles in our front yard.

Lindsey and my dad prepare the pizza

I really love the Pampered Chef glass measuring cups.  They are so durable!

The carrot cake and turtle brownie bites.  Mmmm.

Dad making his list and checking it twice.

My mom and Josie

Lindsey and Morgan frost the carrot cake bites.

The finished pizza.

It was a great Sunday, spent with people I love, relaxing and eating.  What could be better than that?

Today's Poem . . .

Jean


A woman's face
on the cover of a magazine,
puffy, shining moon.
It took my breath away,
pushed tears to my eyes:
she looked so much like you
that last time we met.


The sign outside the door of your room
was made by one of your sons.
It warned all in the house to be quiet,
that a massage was in session.

A grim smile crossed my lips. 


How would I dare give you a "regular" massage,
you with your so-white skin, delicate as a child's,
you with more prescription bottles than I have ever seen
for one person at one time
cluttering the bathroom counter,
your name on the labels.


I placed my hands on you, gently, gently.
I watched the rise and fall of your chest as you slept.
The afternoon sun bathed us both in its golden light
but you were halfway gone,
halfway on to that other place
we all find alone.


Jean, you were not afraid
in that moment.
You accepted. You slept.

Inside, I know you were dancing.

--Amy Hoffman

Poem

This Day

Today hell has finally frozen over.
Mephistopheles glides by, double-runnered, huffing,
a spark in his eye,
Today God is getting new frames,
has lost count, momentarily, of the angels and pins.
A sparrow falls, dusts himself off, spits, gets back up again.

Today is my lucky day.  Heybobareebob.
I am plumb loco with luck, He Who Walks Backwards,
the one left alone on the wagon-train ambush,
tetched in the head, maize boy, too much in the sun,
the one who holds on to the overturned lifeboat,
who crawls like a worm from within the mass grave.

I am high man on the totem pole.
I walk from the plane wreck, stand up in the fusillade.
There is no bullet that bears my name.
I will never be taken alive.

Today it is for other men to be broken into boys,
for others to saw at their legs to survive.
I am Jack be nimble.  The world can shut its trap.
My friends, my brothers are the heavy hearts.
The mark is on them.
They are scathed, fall chickens, good joes petered out.

No blood is daubed like unction on their chambered doors.
The man going through their rubbish outside
has brought them his sorrow, some vagrant plague.
They are the flies someone actually hurts.

Today the moon makes eyes at me.
Today I know the exact intensity that a woman brings
to the brushing to the left of the rivers of her hair.
When I hold her, the woman, the moon, I see in her eyes
the reflection, the waving arms of the dying and the drowned.
I make love to her anyway, lucky stiff, lucky bastard,
lucky as all get-out and hell.

--John Hodgen

A Poem for Today

 This was my favorite poem when I was in high school.

 
The Song of Wandering Aengus

 I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire aflame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And some one called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

--William Butler Yeats

Emily Dickinson's "Hope"

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

--Emily Dickinson

William Stafford "Afterwards"

Afterwards

Mostly you look back and say, "Well, OK. Things might have
been different, sure, and it's too bad, but look--
things happen like that, and you did what you could."
You go back and pick up the pieces. There's tomorrow.
There's that long bend in the river on the way
home. Fluffy bursts of milkweed are floating
through shafts of sunlight or disappearing where
trees reach out from their deep dark roots.

Maybe people have to go in and out of shadows
till they learn that floating, that immensity
waiting to receive whatever arrives with trust.
Maybe somebody has to explore what happens
when one of us wanders over near the edge
and falls for awhile. Maybe it was your turn.

--William Stafford

Marie Howe's "Hurry"

Hurry

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store
and the gas station and the green market and
Hurry up honey, I say, hurry hurry,
as she runs along two or three steps behind me
her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.

Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?
To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?

Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,
Honey I'm sorry I keep saying Hurry--
you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.

And Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking
back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,
hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.

--Marie Howe

Poetry Time!

The Wren from Carolina

Just now the wren from Carolina buzzed
through the neighbor's hedge
a line of grace notes I couldn't even write down
much less sing.

Now he lifts his chestnut colored throat
and delivers such a cantering praise---
for what?
For the early morning, the taste of the spider,

for his small cup of life
that he drinks from every day, knowing it will refill.
All things are inventions of holiness,
Some more rascally than others.

I'm on that list too,
though I don't know exactly where.
But every morning, there's my own cup of gladness,
and there's the wren in the hedge, above me, with his

blazing song.


---Mary Oliver

poem by e.e. cummings

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old
   
may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young
   
and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile

--e.e. cummings

Today's Poem: "So Much Happiness"

So Much Happiness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of dust and noise
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records...

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

--Naomi Shihab Nye

In Honor of National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month (!) and I am going to try to post one poem each day in honor of it. That way I can share more of my favorites with you, and it will spur me to discover poetry as yet untasted. Maybe I will even share one of my own. :)

Here is today's offering:

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast.

Forgive me
they were
delicious
so sweet
and so cold.


--William Carlos Williams