PrintSemi-Homemade With Sandra Lee
I'm just curious, do any of you watch this show? I'll watch just about anything on the Food Network- I'll even watch Guy Fieri's cringe inducing Diner's, Drive-ins and Dives, but I just can't bring myself to watch Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee. Her food is rarely appetizing, her "tablescapes" are cheesy and quite frankly, I have no idea why she has a show. I mean, I guess her recipes are helpful for mom's on the go who don't have a lot of time on their hands for dinner, but I don't count what she does as "cooking." It simply looks as if she opens a bunch of packages, jars and containers, dumps things together and then has the audacity to call her meals gourmet! What do you guys think of Sandra Lee, do you watch her show?
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Comments are closed: 24 Comments:
Honestly, I have never downloaded or even considered trying her "recipes". Many of the Network chefs take a little help from the store when preparing, but the thought of putting Cool Whip in anything makes me cringe. I do not watch Diners, Drive-Ins and Drives unless I have seen everything else 10 times! With that said, she has a following and good ratings, go figure.
crazyspice at 7:59AM on 02/26/08
She drives me nuts. The thing is, I'm not even sure how much of a following she actually has. I've looked at the comments on some of her recipes and they are almost always negative. Cocktail time is the worst - what's wrong with serving your guests a real martini or a nice glass of wine? Most people I know would appreciate it more than red wine she's had in her slow-cooker with frozen fruit all day long.
mmclau28 at 8:44AM on 02/26/08
My wife will not let me say what I really want to say. To sum it up though, her show is unwatchable (in my opinion, your mileage may vary).
feep at 8:58AM on 02/26/08
Whenever I really get wound up, I have a friend who'll say, "Why don't you tell us how you really feel!" PumpkinBear, you've already summed up my thoughts in your question. feep, take a deep breath, try again and let it all out. I need a good laugh today... ;~)
czken at 9:09AM on 02/26/08
I sometimes watch as if I am watching a natural disaster. I can't avert my eyes, I just keep mumbling...oh god...NO NO NO...not the can of soup...NO NO NO...please god make it stop!!! It is like a train wreck.
JerzeeTomato at 9:10AM on 02/26/08
I sometimes watch just to talk about everything she's done wrong in her episodes. I will never try one of her recipes and I would never consider the Oriental Trading disasters she calls "tablescapes."
heartnibbler at 9:27AM on 02/26/08
Whenever I have the chance. I know this is gonna sound kind of mean, but I really enjoy watching her and yelling things at the screen when the food crosses over from meh to just ridiculously stupid, especially her drinks and "tablescapes."
That she can take a perfectly good food item and completely destroy it with semi-homemade "shortcuts" when said item would have been just lovely all on it's own is a source of amazement to me.
chisai at 9:46AM on 02/26/08
That the show has high ratings just confirms a large Stepford wives demographic that identifies with Sandra Lee's robotic gestures which she refers to as "cooking." It's a clear sign of waivering integrity that the network even condones a show like that, but oh well, I guess some people get it, and advertisers are willing to pay.
Microwaving Smucker's jam and dumping it on Breyers ice cream just doesn't seem like a recipe to me so much as a commercial. Plus, I'll just say it, the woman gives me the creeps.
savecara at 9:53AM on 02/26/08
I can't stand the show. She doesn't use real ingredients. It's just not natural.
bitchincamero at 10:13AM on 02/26/08
We should be hearing from PerkyMac on the subject of "Aunt Sandy" soon. Probably chiff0nade, too. I've never heard from a single Serious Eater who likes her show. Sometimes, like Jerzee, I watch because I can't manage to avert my eyes. Just when I think she can't top her previous disaster, she comes up with something worse. Please check out the infamous Kwanzaa Kake on the Food Network website.
P.S. Please don't crucify me, but I think Guy Fietti is kind of cute. I'm serious.
Kerosena at 10:22AM on 02/26/08
Oh God, here we go again...If she can't authentically create anything else, she can create a buzz. Just mention her name and you can imagine genuine chefs and culinarians all over the country curling into fetal positions. You know what they say about bad p.r.....we're still talking about her, aren't we?
Does anyone remember the episode when she brings her birdbath or birdhouse in from the yard for her tablescape? She didn't say to go and buy a new one -" just bring in your sweet little bird bath and puh-lace your adorable butter-fuh-ly cookies on it"! She is just not right.
frederika at 10:35AM on 02/26/08
Okay, so I bit and looked up Kwanzaa Kake on FN. Umm, there are corn nuts in it. Corn nuts. In a cake. With canned apple filling. I now almost want to make it. Just to see how awful it is. I won't though.
chisai at 10:41AM on 02/26/08
The best was I was at a bookstore looking for Alice Water's book "Slow Food" for my boyfriend's mother, and I asked the cashier if they had it available, which they didn't, she directed me to the Sara Lee cookbook collection and told me how great they were. I was so stunned I didn't know really what to say.
malenky at 11:04AM on 02/26/08
I kinda take offense to that "moms on the go who have no time" remark. I have four little sous chefs and I wouldn't feed them her "food/crap". All I think about when I see her show is she needs a better bra. Weird, I know.
evilchefmom at 11:06AM on 02/26/08
Oh, honey. You put a large opener to a #10 can of worms.
Some people insist on defending Lee because she "serves a purpose" for busy moms. No mom was busier than mine and she always prepared real food for my brother and me. There is no need to open boxes of fake food when so many good ingredients are available to most people in their supermarket. The only thing accomplished by Lee's food is a ticket on the Emergency Room Express. If her salt and sugar laden crap doesn't get you, her inedible garnishes will.
Ms. Lee rose to fame as result of her husband's intervention. He had the good sense to divorce her but not until the damage was done. His name is Bruce Karatz - he is the owner of KB Homes. He used to bankroll her efforts and managed to wangle a deal with TVFN for her to have a show. He'd put her "cookbooks" in his homes for the new owners - and thus, a Kitchen Joke was born.
One of my fave eps was when she assembled an entire dining room table and chairs out in a park under a tree. She "cooked" in the park and didn't bother refrigerating the perishables at the cooking site. And Chisai - don't even get me started on those terrible holiday cakes! That show is a cult classic! :D
In any case, thanks for bringing this up again...it always makes me smile when someone discovers Shamdra and her schtick. It's the shock factor that usually grabs people, especially those of us who cook, because we can't believe how loooow she can gooooo.
chiff0nade at 11:07AM on 02/26/08
I actually have her Easter Bunny Cake episode recorded. It could easily be an SNL skit, and the finished cake looks more like a rabid bunny than a bunny rabbit. The whole things is hilarious.
Every now and then, I manage to catch a snippet of her show, and it's like watching a bad horror flick where you're screaming at the TV "No! Don't go down into the basement!" You know it's not going to be good, but you watch, anyway.
I recall one episode where she was going to make "breakfast crepes," and her shortcut was to use store-bought flour tortillas for the crepes. Then she filled 'em with some kind of scrambled egg mixture, and I kept thinking that if she had called 'em breakfast burritos, the recipe would make sense. But no, these were crepes in her world.
In another, she made some kind of pork-filled wonton and steamed them, and when she went to the "tasting" shot, you could see by the look on her face that these things weren't cooked. Blech. Priceless.
It's not the fact that she uses storebought products that bothers me -- I mean, we don't all mill our own wheat and make tortillas and brew our own worchestershire sauce -- we all buy some ready-made stuff, and I honestly see no problem with a recipe that uses something like velveeta, if that's the taste you're after.
With SL, however, it's the things she does with the ingredients that makes no sense. She'll buy chunky store-bought guacamole, and run it through a strainer to get rid of the lumps. Huh? It takes under a minute to split open an avocado and mash it until its as smooth as you want. If your concept is to save time by using these "tricks," why come up with a method that takes more time with the store-bought item than it would take if you started from scratch?
There was another where she did something completely insane...like she bought a cake, and the scraped off the frosting and said that you could save that for another cake. Yeah, that makes sense.
dbcurrie at 11:25AM on 02/26/08
Oh. my. dear. god.
What ARE Corn Nuts doing on a cake?
What do corn nuts have to do with Kwanza?
Don't corn nuts taste like homeless guy toenails?
....and her birdbath? from outside? with cookies on it? To eat?
hello.. bird-flu!
bisbee at 11:27AM on 02/26/08
My mom taught me that if you can't say anything nice about a person, you just shouldn't say anything at all, so I'll leave it at that.
DaveFaris at 11:43AM on 02/26/08
I watched the show briefly when it first came out, and haven't watched it since. Don't care to waste my time.....if you don't like her....why watch?
mepolo at 11:46AM on 02/26/08
I've stated my opinion of her many times before on this site. It's a lot like beating a stale, price-reduced-for-immediate-sale angel food cake. So, I'll just leave it at (1) for me, watching her show is the as looking at the scene of a devastating accident on the Interstate, that you really don't want to see, but just can't seem to tear your eyes away, and (2) she's much easier to watch if you turn off the sound and use captioning. Oh. And having a couple of glasses of wine already under your belt before her show begins helps immensely!
@frederika, wow. You totally nailed her speech mannerisms. That actually kind of scares me a little. Are you okay, honey?
LoCo at 11:51AM on 02/26/08
As I've mentioned before, hubby and I watch her show. It helps to release any tension that accumulates after a long week of hard work as "watching her show" is usually quite emotional (reaction ranging from laughing hysterically to yelling, "you wasteful twat!" or "WTF?" or "no, she did NOT!" in disbelief). Confession time - every Saturday morning, at 10 am, we dutifully set our TiVo to record a new epi of the Semi-Ho disaster. Why TiVo, you ask? Because so often what she says (or does, or both) doesn't make any sense, so we have to rewind with the usual "WTF?" to make sure we saw and heard what we thought we saw and heard. Like, when last Saturday she said, "these two (referring to 2 chicken breasts) goes onto my plate". The woman claims she was an English major, for crying out loud! Or when she said "tiramisu a la orange", meaning to say, "tiramisu l'orange". Or when she said that "France is the city of lights". Or when she was talking about not wanting to use "Adult spinach". Or when she makes a sandwich (a sandwich!) of focaccia (pronounced by Sandy: for-kasha) with Cesar salad made from the supermarket-bought kit, complete with dressing and croûtons (yes, she put croûtons INto a sandwich). I can go on and on. Albert Einstein once said: "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." Sandy certainly proves that he was right.
Now, I'm not sure if I could bear doing this all on my own, but hubby and I are quite a good team:-). And while I consider her evil and extraordinary wasteful, I've got to admit that she's made me laugh so often that if the FN ever decides to drop her, I'll miss my "comedy hour" every Saturday morning.
brooke29 at 12:49PM on 02/26/08
Sandra Lee is a freak. While I can respect her commitment to an afternoon cocktail, her food looks gross and her neck is way too long in a creepy, Celine Dion-ish way.
Make sure you check out her Halloween episode where she dresses up in various costumes. I want to say one of them was Elvira...
ultraviolet79 at 12:49PM on 02/26/08
I love Sandra Lee. I also love to shove forks in my eyes for fun, so what the heck do I know?
Seriously though, she creeps me out, and I sometimes wonder if they have subliminal messages that keep me from changing the channel when I accidentally land on her show. From her ridiculous "recipes" to her awful "tablescapes," oh PLEASE. She wouldn't know real food if it hit her in the face.
What really, truly made my jaw drop to the ground was when she made drinks for a bunch of kids. Kiddie cocktails or something equally ridiculous, which were served in margarita glasses. These were 11 year old boys and girls who'd come over for a party! Nice job, Sandra - I'm glad you're raising the next generation's batch of alcoholics right.
lorelei76 at 1:04PM on 02/26/08
We agree with many of the commenters about Sandra Lee's strengths and weaknesses, but we believe this thread has run its course, as the comments have gotten particularly nasty. Sandra Lee clearly consistently raises people's hackles, but perhaps we should give her a rest on Serious Eats for awhile.
Ed Levine at 1:16PM on 02/26/08