Sandra Lee Semi-Homemade Cooking
by Sandra Lee
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Book Reviews of Sandra Lee Semi-Homemade Cooking
Book Review: How to spend ten times what you should on food that's barely fit to eat
Summary: 1 Stars
Semi-Homemade Cooking is the name of Sandra Lee's show on the Food Network, a cable station in the United States theoretically dedicated to cooking. I say theoretically because what Sandra Lee does in this book and on her show is not cooking in any sense of the word, and if the Food Network were really a cooking station Lee would have been on her rear end years ago.
To put it plainly, this is a book for people who are not very bright. Lee basically takes overprocessed, ridiculously expensive premade foods and arranges them into new combinations, adding the odd badly made homemade garnish or ingredient to her typical hopeless mishmash of precooked overprocessed chemical-laden garbage. She presents this as some kind of new method of cooking, when in fact it's just a combination of mental laziness and indifference to real flavour and nutrition.
The entire idea of a cookbook is to show the reader how to cook food from scratch. Lee proudly proclaims that nothing in her book is from scratch, which is somewhat like a model proudly proclaiming that every one of her attractions was created by her plastic surgeon. Most ingredients called for in her "recipes" are heavily processed, pre-salted, pre-spiced, and pre-cooked to appeal to the lowest common denominator. There's no ingenuity, no creativity in her ideas. It's as if she, a food writer, cares so little about food that she puts convenience and conventionality above flavour.
One of the most disturbing features of the book is how Lee seems to think her cooking is somehow 'budget'. It's not. Her method of cooking is unspeakably expensive compared to cooking from scratch, simply because processed food costs more than basic ingredients. Certainly if you're unwilling or not intelligent enough to learn how to cook and if you buy everything premade in packages, taking those packages apart and mixing their contents together will not increase your food budget, but you could save a lot of money and eat much better if you would only put a little effort into your cooking and actually learn to make things from scratch.
This book is one of the most pathetic excuses for a cookbook I've ever read. I definitely do not recommend it. In fact, were I to see it on the bookshelf of a man I was dating, I would break off the relationship.
Book Review: Not fancy, just easy and delicious!
Summary: 5 Stars
I have to take issue with those reviewers who have attacked this book so passionately! True, there are "gourmet" cooks who wouldn't dream of adding any prepared foods to their recipes; they obviously have the time and energy to spend hours in the kitchen every day. However, I don't understand why a "gourmet" cook would even consider buying a book entitled "Semi-Homemade" anything!
This book was obviously written for people like me, who no longer have the time or energy to spend all day in the kitchen, and "Semi-Homemade Cooking" has been the answer to my prayers! I probably own a hundred cookbooks, most of them gathering dust on a bookshelf in the living room. I've been cooking for forty years, and only a few cookbooks have stood the test of time well enough to remain on my kitchen counter; this is the newest one to make the grade.
No, I do not consider myself a "gourmet" cook. I used to make complicated, time-consuming dishes that took hours and hours, but, frankly, many of them weren't any better than my favorite quick & easy recipes! And at 63, I want recipes that I can put together quickly and that everyone will enjoy. I am having a great time trying one recipe after another from this cookbook because none of them have taken a lot of time, and every single one has been delicious! Try Country Biscuits and Gravy, for example; my husband asks for it every Sunday. And Salad Chinois (Chinese Chicken Salad) is superb!
Bottom line: This is not a book for food snobs! This is a book for people who want delicious meals they can prepare themselves with a minimum of fuss. Try it, you'll love it! Many thanks to Sandra Lee -- I'm ordering "Semi-Homemade II".
Book Review: You can cook quickly and easily, quicker and easier than this.
Summary: 2 Stars
Supposedly, the great benefit to Sandra Lee's cookbooks are that they're super fast, easy, and don't require a lot of cooking skill to prepare.
As a graduate student, this sort of thing should appeal to me. I don't have a lot of time or money. This should help that, right?
Except it doesn't. Buying a load of packaged convenience foods and then arranging them festively isn't any easier, or quicker, than cooking with fresh ingredients. I'm not some foodie hipster dweeb who claims that everything needs to be fresh, local, from scratch, homegrown, organic, et cetera. I'm something of a pragmatist, at least. I use canned tomatoes, chickpeas, and frozen veggies with regularity. But if I can whip out an excruciatingly tasty risotto in 30 minutes using seven bucks worth of ingredients as I did last night, so can everybody.
Take the time to learn a few basic techniques, maybe treat yourself to a basic cooking class, buy the freshest and least processed ingredients possible, spend some time experimenting, and you'll be able to improvise meals far tastier than anything out of Sandra Lee's book while spending less money and time. Cooking is only as hard as you make it. The reason it takes forever and isn't any fun is, frankly, because most people don't really know how, and their effort tends to be inefficiently applied and fraught with errors and unnecessary difficulty. It doesn't need to be that way. Sandra Lee teaches you how to cop out and let ConAgra do the prep work; why not simply learn how to cook well so that you can do it quickly and enjoyably?
Book Review: She can't cook!
Summary: 1 Stars
This woman cannot cook. It's a travesty that she has her own show on the Food Network with the likes of Mario Batalli and Alton Brown. Okay, here's one of her brilliant ideas.
1) Pumpkin Pie Petit-fours: Bake your own crust in these small tins, then buy a WHOLE PUMPKIN PIE, scoop out the filling, and pipe it into the new crusts. Why not eat the damn pumpkin pie that you just bought!? She did the same thing with a cheesecake. She ruined a perfectly good cheescake just so she could pipe the filling onto her petit-fours crusts.
Doesn't that seem a little backwards to you? If you were to make a "semi-homemade" petit-fours tray, don't you think you'd want to just make the filling yourself, and then use storebought crusts?
Here's another great idea of hers.
A vanilla wafer, topped with a slice of banana, with a dollop of store-bought banana pudding on top. Voila, instant crap! She really has mad skillz, doesn't she? Mad culinary skillz. I could've done this when I was four.
I swear, the lady can't even make hamburger helper.
Semi-homemade my butt. More like barely-homemade. More like "I bought everything pre-made and then ARRANGED it to look nice." That's not cooking, that's lying.
And her "table-scapes" are horrible.
Book Review: Try some of these, they're good, they're fast!
Summary: 4 Stars
After reading a few of the reviews of this cookbook, I was a little confused. I bought Semi-Homemade Cooking without reading any reviews, and I'm glad I did. I'm a regular old mom and housewife, and one of my main goals every day is to make a delicious, hearty meal for my hard-working husband to appreciate when he gets home. I can't make a from-scratch masterpiece every day (especially with a one-year-old running around), so that is where this cookbook comes in handy!
Sure, there is some obvious brand-name dropping, but that doesn't make me buy them. So far, the mushroom steak and sweet mash as well as the sweet and sour pork recipe have become regulars in our monthly meal rotation. The easy cookie cobbler was delicious and a cinch to make. My only problem with this cookbook is there were far too many alcoholic drink recipes and fancy-pants-type recipes. Not the type of stuff you'd make for an every-day family dinner. Overall, Semi-homemade Cooking lives up to its name and will save you some time while still providing your family with a great-tasting, satisfying meal after a long day!