Tupperware

Today I went to a Tupperware party, the second one I have been to in my life. The first one was about 15 years ago when, if I remember correctly, I came to my cousin's house, drank some wine and admired some plastic stuff, and didn't buy a thing.


A week ago I told a friend I was going to a Tupperware party, and she immediately waxed lyrical about $40 lunch boxes and asked if I had a catalogue. I had a digital one, and we looked through it together over coffee while I tried not to spray the coffee out of my mouth in a cliche of shock. Holy cow, this stuff was expensive!

My friend told me that the last time she went to a Tupperware party she spent $400.
"Oh my god," I said, while inwardly I thought, Ha ha, you big chump! How did you do that!

So today I went to a Tupperware party to support a friend, and thought I would just buy one thing, if I could find something useful that wouldn't require a second mortgage.

National Museum of American History/Flickr CC

I very quickly found my Useful Thing: a sort of a manual food processor which chops, blends, whips or purees at the pull of a string. Sounds dodgy - actually works great (I had a go). I don't own a food processor. My blender is only good for blending. So this was obviously worth the money *.

Then I found another Useful Thing: a replacement for my rice cooker that got lost some years ago.  I used to have a plastic rice cooker I bought at Kmart that I used all the time, not only to cook rice but also to make risottos and to steam vegetables. (Ha ha ha ha ha, my kids used to actually eat vegetables and risottos!)

The red bowl of my old rice cooker was a really good size and I used it as a mixing bowl and storage bowl too.  Then the lid got lost so it just became a mixing bowl. Then I took it to the school to collect eggs one weekend when we were on chook duty, and left it behind, full of nice brown eggs, sitting on top of a compost bin in the blazing sun.

I have always intended to replace my rice cooker.  I could have easily gone back to Kmart (where they still sell them for about $12) and bought one there. But why wouldn't I actually get a nice purple one from Tupperware, for only three times the price, now that the catalogue and a friendly hostess were right there in front of me?  So that was obviously worth the money too.

But then, a really, really Useful Thing. Tupperware these days also make cookware, and sitting right in front of me on the hostess' benchtop in all its gleaming, steely glory, was the heavy-bottomed casserole/saucepan combination of my dreams.

Some years ago my mother gave us a pair of heavy-bottomed saucepans that changed my life. I had no idea how much easier they make cooking. We used those saucepans almost daily for years. The small one got burnt out in the forgotten boiling eggs incident of 2014, and the large one is still being used but the non-stick coating is starting to flake off in tiny bits on the bottom, and I know that's not good.

So I have been wanting a replacement large, heavy-bottomed saucepan for some time, but I just couldn't afford one. Until today, I guess?


So... yeah. I can no longer chuckle at my friend spending all that money on Tupperware.


*I have not used it.