Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Culinary Magic! "Heirloom" recipes from Sandra Lee.... Really?

I'm still trying to recover from watching the cloying Sandra Lee, the host of the most vapid of Food Network TV shows "Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee" make what she called an "Heirloom Spring Vegetable Side Dish." For those who don't know, "Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee" is a show in which Sandra assembles frozen, packaged and highly processed foods into concoctions which she passes off as being "homemade." It's truly culinary magic! Like magic, it involves a lot of misdirection.

Sandra is always nattering on about how "healthy", "fresh" and "wholesome" her cooking is. Uhhh, yep. In Sandra's case, "homemade" seems to mean you sneak the packaging the processed food came in into the trash when no-one is looking.

In this particular recipe, she de-bags frozen green beans, carrots, corn etc. into a crock pot, slathers it all with canned condensed asparagus soup and a packet of freeze dried leek soup, and cooks this sorry mess for FOUR hours. (Presumably to super-concentrate the sodium, and finish destroying any nutritional content that may have survived the processing.)

Never mind that in a food context "heirloom" is generally used to describe cultivars of fruits, vegetables or animals which date to before industrialized factory farming became prevalent, before foods began to be bred to store for as long as possible rather than taste good. Never mind that this mess cannot even remotely be described as "semi-homemade." (Whatever that means.)

Frozen vegetables cooked for four hours?

Really?

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