Friday, February 20, 2009

The Love to Hate Club

http://www.foodmayhem.com/uploaded_images/Sandra-Lee-749320.JPG


I fear I may have tipped my hand here. My daughter and I watch this show for laughs combined with moral outrage. We particularly enjoy the face she makes as she sips her latest alcoholic concoction. The last episode we caught featured white chocolate polenta. White chocolate polenta? You mean cornmeal mush with melted white chocolate? I had to watch it twice because I thought I had missed something. Particularly when she added thyme and rosemary.

The amusing bit about her episodes is that the through line is an ingredient, or perhaps a color scheme. One episode featured lemon juice in every course. The monotony, the monotony! To break it up she alternated bottled lemon juice with freshly squeezed.

I know Rachel Ray is particularly vilified, but I just switch the channel. Sandra Lee, on the other hand, with her addiction to vanilla vodka and her compulsion to ruin perfectly excellent fresh ingredients with packaged salts, mixes, and white chocolate chips, with her visible wince each time she tastes the alcoholic perversion she's created: I find it frankly impossible to avert my gaze. By the way, which cooking show do you love to hate?

6 comments:

  1. I don't know this woman. Is she on cable? We don't have cable. But one look at her makes me suspicious. I really don't trust the ultra skinny, pretty cooking show hosts. If they like food so, so much why are they so, so thin. I don't buy it. I don't think they trust food, let alone enjoy it. I like to see at least a little meat on my chefs. At least then I know they've tasted what they've made.

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  2. When I was at Hotel Hope and watching the Food Network 24-7, I really liked Sandra Lee at first. Sometimes I'm more about style than substance, and I like to keep things simple, so she seemed right up my alley. But, the more I watched, the more she grated on me for the same reasons as yours.

    And her styling is too girly and overly themed.

    I love Martha and also love to hate her.

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  3. lol this is funny. if you love to hate sandra and some other food network personalities, i highly recommend foodnetworkhumor.com!

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  4. CP--you are definitely going to keep me on my writing toes. Fingertips? I tightened up the sentence so it made better sense. M: I, too, distrust a skinny chef. S: Overly-themed, yes that's what I mean--
    Thanks for the link, Jackie!

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  5. I don't watch cooking shows, though if I happen to catch something at the gym I usually learn. There was a guy browning a roast - that came in handy. Or Martha. I like Martha. But usually I park myself on a treadmill in front of Oprah or CNN.

    White chocolate polenta sounds like it would just make me barf, though.

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