Semi-Homemade Cooking
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Semi-Homemade Cooking is a cooking show hosted by Sandra Lee. It airs on the Food Network. The intention of the show, according with its website blurb, is to show how to create foods that look and taste homemade by using "shortcuts" i.e. boxed mixes, frozen dishes, and ready-to-serve canned stuff, combined with fresh ingredients.
The show has gained notoriety and infamy among viewers and food critics for her excessive reliance on already-cooked store-bought items and pre-packaged mixes of dubious quality, over-emphasis on decoration and presentation, the very-low quality of those decorations, and the alarming amount of alcoholic drinks the host drinks on camera. It is considered by several reviewers as one of the worst cooking shows ever created.
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- Bile Fascination: a lot of people watched just to see what bizarre recipe she would present this time.
- Cooking Show: for a certain value of "cooking".
- Cordon Bleugh Chef: some of the concoctions created by Lee are not particularly appetizing. Memorably infamous was her Kwanzaa Cake, simultaneously unpalatable and disrespectful (the original recipe and video have disappeared from the internet, but Cake Wrecks preserved some images of it for posterity). Albeit that was the most infamous, a list collecting her worst ten desserts mention, among others, a "Christmas Crescent Ring" (a wreath made of crescent rolls that are then filled with almond paste and jam, and then covered in so much glaze you can taste the diabetes coming from it); and a "white chocolate polenta" that consist in a normal savory cheese and thyme polenta with the addition of half a cup of white chocolate chips.
- Lady Drunk: Ms. Lee sure loves her cocktails, to the point that in our very drinking game one item is "drink whatever she is preparing"
- Product Placement: unlike other TV cooks, she rarely hides the brands of the ingredients she uses.