My Dinner with Gourmet: Part Three

Part One Here

Part Two Here

Welcome to Part Three!

The table has been set and the house cleaned. I’ve got recorders hidden underneath the dining room table and high atop the kitchen cabinet. In North Dakota, it’s legal to tape a conversation as long as one of the parties, including the one recording, knows that it is being recorded. The more you know. Shooting star.

Fiancé and I are watching Fringe as we wait for Simplicity Gourmet to arrive.

Nervous.

Wondering if Fiancé will be able to resist.

Fiancé says she’s scared. We agree that I’ll do most of the talking, which is nullified almost from the moment Simplicity Gourmet arrives (from here on, he’ll be SG).

The doorbell rings. SG enters. The best way to describe him is to compare him to a cartoon children’s minister. He’s in his 40s, about 5’ 6” and has light, thinning hair up top. He has spectacles, a stout build, and a round head with a goatee. He’s carrying a hard suitcase and shakes my hand and introduces himself with a boisterous, “Welcome to the party! Ha ha! How you guys doing?”

His manner is enthusiastic without being annoyingly so, and feminine enough to be non-threatening, which is why I can’t get the idea out of my head that he was a youth pastor in a former life. If he’d had a cross in the suitcase, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

He asks us how much we know about what he’s doing – the free vacation, the menu, the coupon for wedding invitations. He compliments us on our memory of what we had been told. He asks which of us is the cook (me).

“Did they tell you I was going to show you some cool cookware?” he asks.

“No, they did not mention that,” Fiancé responds. It’s not a lie, but our research had made us very aware of the reason for this visit.

As he sets up, he asks about our wedding day, where we grew up, how long we’ve been together. As if reading my priestly thoughts, he quotes The Princess Bride: “Twoo Wuv! This is what bwings us togetha…” We discuss a mutual admiration for Wallace Shawn, although we could not recall his name.

He starts his pitch.

“So here is the skinny on the cookware you guys. It gives me a chance to showcase what we call waterless greaseless cookware. Have you guys ever heard of it? What it is, is we teach people to cook foods a little faster and a heck of a lot healthier. So it’s heart smart. It retains vitamins and minerals. I’m gonna fry chicken and potatoes together but I’m not going to use any butter or fats or greases to cook them in so it’s more heart smart. I’m going to do three vegetables all in one pan. I’m going to use a tablespoon of water to cook them in so it’s going to retain all the vities (re: vitamins) and minerals and what have ya. I’m also going to make you a peach cobbler in a small skillet on top of the flame.  You can actually bake desserts on top with the cookware instead of in the oven. It’s kind of cool to bake things on top of the burner instead of in the oven. The cookware we do have is an investment, it’s not cheap cookware, it’s meant to last forever, it’s healthy, it comes with a spectacular warrantees, warrantees you can use forever, it’s waranteed for your lifetimes and then when you pass away you can will your cookware one generation down and transfer the cookware for two people’s lifetimes (I swear he didn’t use periods, but commas during this part). It is an investment, OK? You guys like it, and you want to look at a brochure when I’m done feeding you, feel free. If you don’t want to look at a brochure, that’s cool, that’s completely cool, too. One thing I do tell folks before I get started is at the end it’s truly never a question whether people can afford it, it’s a question of if they like it. We have a budget plan, so we can fit this into anybody’s particular budget. If you guys see yourself going out to a restaurant once a month and dropping 40-50 bucks. If you can give that up one time a month, you can afford to have this stuff. I really believe it.”

SG is good. He has us sitting on chairs while he speaks, jumping from health to the food to warrantees and preparing us for any sticker shock that may come later. He moves to the free vacation, which is a 3 day 2 night stay at an all inclusive “escape” to Mexico, Dominican Republic or Costa Rica. The food, non-alcoholic beverages, and non-motorized activities are all included as well. Airfare would be up to us. He says the reason they figure they can do this is few people want to travel to the tropics for two nights and will extend their vacation for $100-125 a night per couple. He asks us if it would be cool to never have to buy cookware again. Fiancé says it hasn’t been that big a deal. I struggle to remember the last time we had to buy cookware. It was a wok we got as a Christmas gift. Before that, maybe 5 years. SG lightly praises the convenience of not having to shop for a $20 pan every couple years before moving on. I wonder who I know that may be buying such shoddy cookware so often.

Fiancé asks if he has been on the vacation. He hasn’t. Has anyone he knows? Yes. Do they enjoy it? Of course they do!

SG, not to be swayed, brings the conversation back to the food and shows us the special whistles in the lids of the pans that tell the cook when to close the valve and let the food start cooking on a low heat.

Fiancé asks where SG is from. A small town 2 hours away. He covers a big area, and is in Fargo for a couple days.

He brings it back to the food, asks us if we are vegetable fans. He uses a rather large gadget to chop up carrots. He asks what we do. We tell him Fiancé is unemployed. We teach when we can and when state budgets don’t screw us over. Fiancé is upbeat, tells him she’s looking for something a little more full time. He slides into talking about the one piece that some people start with, if anything, of their cookware, an electric skillet with a synthetic grease core that spreads the heat evenly from a simmer up to 400 degrees. You can do roasts, casseroles, even popcorn in this skillet. He drops in the chicken breasts.

SG: So when you do put stuff in here at first, it sticks. But the difference between this and something at the store is as it sears it will let loose from the bottom of the pan and flip right over.

Fiancé: So have you seen a lot of couples this week? Is this just what you do?

SG: This is what I do.

Fiancé: Wow. That’s kind of fun.

SG: This is it.

Me: You work at night all the time?

M: Pretty much, during the day people are at work and stuff. On Saturdays I’ll do daytime and lunches. Occasionally there are people who do swing shifts. You can make fresh hash browns for Sunday morning. Making fresh potato chips for you as well. So, you got your resume flying out there trying to find something?

Fiancé: Pretty much everywhere

SG: All over the place, huh? Positive thinking will get you a position. (it hasn’t)

Fiancé: That’s what I’m hoping.

SG: So when the spuds go in with the chicken, you’ll be eating 8 minutes after that.

The conversation continues this way, a little personal talk, but always going back to the food and the cookware. He segues into the construction – seven layers of metal in every piece: surgical grade stainless steel with nonporous, noncreative titanium, cast iron, three layers of aluminum, and another layer of the surgical grade stainless steel. That’s six layers if you are counting. Not sure where the other one went.

As he discusses the surgical grade steel with titanium, which is “a healthier metal,” he advises us to throw away any of our Teflon coated pans that are flaking or scratching, as Teflon is a carcinogen and will literally kill birds and small animals in or around the kitchen if you overheat the pans.

He moves into the warrantee, how we can will this cookware to our children, that they are the oldest manufacturer of cookware in the US that is still manufactured in the US today. The company started making cast iron skillets back in 1874, moved to stainless steel, then into waterless and greaseless cookware about 70 years ago.

This causes me to wonder why. Why, during the buildup to a war do you make cookware that requires a lot of metals? Why would they give a rat’s ass at the time if their food was made with less water or no grease? Did anyone care how much grease was in his food at that time? SG does not have answers to this. Fiancé gives me a look, because I love asking questions that no reasonable person should have the answer to unless they like to make up assumptions. It’s one of my many “quirks” she puts up with.

So now, in addition to our health, buying this cookware helps to put food on an American factory worker’s plate.

He’s good.

I like him.

Fiancé seems to like him as well.

SG starts talking about the history of the company again. They couldn’t compete with other cookware at Macy’s or Bloomingdales. No one was there to tell the customer why theirs was more expensive or about the superior advantages of their product, the longevity, the quality, the health. I imagine the years ahead with Fiancé, turning valves in lids, cooking lasagna in an electric skillet, getting healthier.

SG now begins to talk about the cost, starting at $200 a piece. The electric skillet is $595. We could invest $7,000 in their cookware sets, but nobody is doing that! No, that’s just a range. With a budget plan, they can start as low as $30 to $35 a month. That’s feasible. That’s reasonable. That’s the cost of eating out once a month.

You get what you pay for with this cookware. It saves time in the kitchen, saves money in your pocket, and will improve your health. How does it save you money, you ask? Well, firstly, you are going to be able to cook on a lower heat with these pans, so there’s the energy savings. You won’t have to replace your pans again, ever, for the low price of $30 a month. But hold on, you also save on groceries with this cookware! Did you know food shrinks when you cook it? Meat can shrink up to 30-35 percent, vegetables as much as 50 percent. So what you do, see, is figure that you’ll save about 20 percent on your grocery budget because you won’t have to buy as much food to make up for shrinkage. That’s enough savings to make up for what you will spend on this cookware, easy!

OK. I can tell you are interested, but we need to pause.

I need to tell you, reader, about the three evils of nutrition.

1.     The grease and fat in your cooking is killing you. It’s the leading cause of heart disease, the leading cause of death in the U.S. of A. Men and women alike. If you don’t eat healthy, you better make time to be sick.

2.     Heat. High heat specifically. Those vegetables you are cooking to eat aren’t doing shit for you. You might as well just throw them away for all the good they do. Once you hit 190 degrees, those vitamins and minerals are done for. There is no nutritionist on earth that would argue with this: Cooked vegetables are not good for you.

3.     Water. That’s right, water, the source and symbol of life on earth. Water is not good to cook foods. Let me submit as proof boiled carrots. All those vitamins and minerals are going down the sink with orange boiled carrot water. Then to eat them, you add butter, brown sugar. That’s not doing you any favors.

Heart disease is killing us as a country. Kids as young as 14 in New York are showing significant risk of heart disease. Listen, in this fast paced, cooking from a box society, it is time to take control! One way to do that is with the right tool. Something that eliminates the need for grease, heat, water, and oxygen (yes, that’s bad for you too). It may be an investment, but when you are 90, looking back on your life with this cookware, you are going to want to thank your young self for taking that leap, for biting that bullet.

It’s simple.

Every piece is like a mini-oven.

It retains 90 percent of the good stuff in your food.

You’ll also get cooking lessons.

DVDs with recipes.

Fiancé: That’s amazing!

We eat. The potatoes are good. The carrots, corn and broccoli, while cooked together, retain their separate flavors, vegetable flavors. The chicken breast is even edible.

SG: What did you guys like about the cookware with what you saw?

Fiancé: No splatter. What about you?

Me: I don’t know.

Fiancé: It was fast, and the food was good.

We continue to eat as SG cleans after himself in the kitchen and talk to us.

SG: Back in the day, people didn’t buy this because of no water or oil or the health benefits, people bought it because they knew they would have decent sized families and the gals wanted one set of kettles that they could use for the rest of their life. Here in the last 20-30 years, since health has become a big problem in this country, the greaseless and waterless side of things have really taken off. You couple that with the harmful effects of Teflon, people are starting to open their eyes. And you know what? Last and certainly not least, it’s nice to have nice things. For the sake of giving up one meal at a sit down joint a month, it’s very doable. I don’t know what your financial situation is. It’s none of my business, but $35 or whatever you can invest in a month and if you want this cookware, we can go over the brochure and look at some cool stuff. If not…

Fiancé: Well we’d like to look at the brochure for sure. We can’t make a commitment tonight because we’d have to look at finances and such. But it is something we are interested in.

SG: Let me ask you this, if this is something you would really want in your house, what would fit comfortable in a monthly budget for the two of you.

Me: Right now, with one of us unemployed…

Fiancé: Nothing. But we’re hoping that, much like my life, as things get better and I get employed, that we would be able to afford something like this.

SG doesn’t want to show us the brochures, or he would have to tell us about pricing, the free gifts and such, and if we aren’t ready to buy, he won’t be able to offer us the same benefits later. I don’t know why that is.

We talk about his kids, the new pool he had put in, mouth-burning foods, how far it is from Mankato to anywhere, the Air Force. He’s pleasant, but working to put away the cookware carefully, deliberately. He makes his way toward the door. I ask about the brochures again.

SG: If it’s something you can look at and afford, yeah I’ll show you one, but if you are not in a position to make that commitment, then don’t. I’m not here to pressure anybody into anything, never have, never will. I don’t want that person in my house or your house. So when you are ready, give me a jingle.

With that, he is gone. Off into the cold night. I almost want to go after him, not for the cookware, but something else. Hope. I need some hope in my life, and it feels like he hadn’t delivered, that he might have some in his vehicle, and that he is driving away with it.

I was impressed by the evening. He wasn’t as pushy as I feared. I felt drawn to buying, but didn’t. And when we said no, he took our answer graciously and moved on.

Fiancé and I do a post-mortem of the evening. We find out that I was more into it than she was. If we weren’t so hard up for a job, I might have even gone ahead with it. However, he lost her several times during the presentation:

1. “Don’t make me feel like I’m less of a human being because I don’t have a job and we decided not to make a commitment tonight. You keep your secret little brochure that I can’t look at, your secret incentives and your secret budget, and take it with you.”

2. The implication that water is a health threat.

3. The fact he hadn’t been on the vacation himself.

4. She didn’t know how this new cookware would work for all the recipes we’ve built up. How do you make Chinese food if you can’t use oil?

5. At one point, he said part of the problem was people cooking out of boxes. The first thing he did was open a box of cake mix to make cobbler (with a can of peach pie filling).

6. The cookware, with all its valves and whistles, was ultimately confusing.

Fiancé: “He was very nice. I liked him, but I also didn’t like him and I’ll tell you why. He didn’t care about the wedding stuff. You are in my house because of my wedding – talk to me about my wedding. Talk to me about Boston. Talk to me about stuff, real stuff, you know?” Hope. It goes a long way.

In the end, the guy came, tried to sell us the American Dream – to get married, have kids, cook at home with nice things, and eventually leave a legacy of cookware for our children. But that isn’t our dream. We passed. And as time passes, even 30 minutes later, I feel no regret.

“I don’t think this is the American Dream,” Fiancé says. “My American Dream is to love you.”