In the past twelve hours, I have suddenly been introduced to the bizzarre subculture that swirls around one Sandra Lee and her Food Network program, Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee.
You see, my wife, instead of becoming a Doper as I might wish, instead has gravitated to the Telvision Without Pity boards (no real problem there, I just like the SDMB more). TWOP, for those of you who may not have ventured over there, tends to have one thread per show, and allow it to run on indefinitely. (My wife was showing me their posters’ varying opinions on another FN personality, Giada DiLaurentiis, in the thread entitled “Everyday Italian in Little Big Head’s Kitchen”, which is up to about 35 pages.)
However, Sandra Lee is different. Sandra Lee inspires such traffic on TWOP that they have had to give her an entire child forum all to herself. The posts in the several dozen threads in that forum are neverending in their vitriol. One poster even created a set of highly amusing photographs illustrating the stages of preparation of her chocolate “truffles”, whose ingredients are: canned frosting, sugar (cuz’ canned frosting isn’t sweet enough, doncha know), vanilla, and cocoa powder. The pictures features the resulting globs posed next to a jug of Special Kitty brand litter, due to their uncanny resemblance to animal waste. The remainder of her recipes seem equally unlikely. What’s more she apparently spends three times as much on decorations (what she calls “tablescapes”) as she does on the food.
Her page on the Food Network Website continues the bizarreness. Each episode’s recipes include a review forum, with Ms. Lee’s detractors giving them all one star out of five, and her supporters giving five stars and exhorting the nay-sayers to leave her alone and get a life. It’s like Food TV’s own private little insane asylum over there. My wife noticed that several negative posts she has seen in the past have apparently been removed.
I checked in the BBQ Pit thread from a couple of months ago lambasting TV chefs, but she received scant coverage there.
Now, we get the east coast feed of Food Network on our DirecTV, so I was up at 8AM to watch this program for myself, and hopefully answer the question “If so many people hate her so much, why don’t they just stop watching when the show comes on?” Well, it turns out that’s like asking you not to look at a train wreck you happen across. More specifically, it’s like trying not to look at a train wreck around which a demented skinny blonde woman is erecting a circus tent in order to disguise the horror within and muffle the cries of the wounded.
It’s not that the basic premise of the show is unsound. The idea seems to be that you can save yourself time, money, and effort by using some processed items in your cooking, as opposed to doing everything from scratch. But it’s her whacked-out sense of where to economize (and for that matter, what constitues an actual recipe) that puts you in “WTF?” mode. And to say she’s a little on the scatterbrained side is putting it mildly.
Today’s episode was about French Foods. Most of the recipes might be all right, except for her insistence that they are “authentic French” cuisine. The only person I can think of who would mistake this for French food would be the mother in the movie Hairspray who accepts the Dutch exchange student’s gift of a milk maid’s bonnet and says “Let’s try on these hats, and find out what it’s like to live in another culture!”
Her Crispy Potato-Pepper Cakes didn’t seem to hang together very well in the pan. Several posters commented in their reviews that they had to add bread crumbs when they tried it. Breac crumbs are listed on the recipe’s web page, but I didn’t see her use any on camera.
The episode’s front page declares that the Parisian Artichokes she will make are bursting with flavor, but I don’t seem to recall her ever getting around to preparing any.
She undercooks her pork (nothing says french like a bout with trichinosis!) and declares her sweet-potato-and-pear concoction to be some sort of souffle.
She surrounds a frozen Sarah Lee pound cake with stuff for dessert, laces some champagne with apricot juice (alcohol is apparently a must for all her meals) and voila!
Her fans (her non-fans call them “Fandras”) are as loopy as she is. Peruse the review posts and you see people having to make significant adjustments to her recipes, but giving her all the credit for whatever quality (at least as they perceive it) emerges.
But then for the really weird part. She tops off the half hour by showing you the paper plates with cartoons of mustachioed waiters on which she plans to serve this feast. She also shows the metal Eiffel Tower sculpture (I think maybe it’s a candle holder) that will act as the centerpiece. To locate this item and pay for it must have taken five times the money and time that went into preparing the food!
She then signs off, reminding us to “Keep it French!”
I have tried to convey an accurate sense of the show and its surrounding insanity while keeping this thread from being too Pit-worthy. If you have experience of this woman and can do the same, let’s hear from you!