http://www.skilletdoux.com/2007/03/evil_is_semihom.html

Every morning at 8:30 AM, my TiVo wakes up to record Mario Batali, but then
it mostly sits around idle until The Simpsons come on in the evening. What
this means is that if I turn on the television at any point in between, I'm
dropped directly into the Food Television late morning / early afternoon
lineup. While I watched the channel quite a bit many moons ago, my recent
viewership has been pretty much limited to the aforementioned Molto and Iron
Chef, both varieties. But over the past couple of weeks, I've taken a couple
of days to leave it on in the background to see what's new.
It ain't pretty.

While it's true that pure evil is Semi-Homemade, Sandra-bashing is bordering
on passé, it's been thoroughly covered by those far more eloquent than me,
and by writing here I realize that I'm preaching to the choir. And while
it's also true that her "recipes" should rightly be feared and reviled by
anybody who has a love for good food (the entire nation of Spain experienced
a collective shudder when her tapas episode aired), I think most of the
critics who savage her concoctions miss the point. There's a larger issue
here.

Most of her recipes simply expose her as somebody with no tastebuds... or
conscience, take your pick. But what makes her evil is not the quality of
her food, but rather that she perpetuates the age-old frustrating myth that
real, delicious, fresh food from scratch is just too hard and takes too much
time. Her entire schtick is predicated on the big lie that hers is the only
way to make delicious, beautiful food in a short period of time. Shredding
store-bought ribs, cooking up a bottled chili sauce and taco seasoning
mishmash, frying frozen potato chips and assembling the whole thing with
packaged cole slaw doesn't take any less time or skill than, say, roasting a
few potatoes, whipping up a fresh aioli, marinating some peppers and
roasting a pork tenderloin. Marinating a salmon steak in store-bought salad
dressing and grilling it on a cedar plank doesn't take any less time or
skill than, say, wrapping a good piece of fish in foil with a little oil and
butter, some garlic, a couple of spices and some greens. Yet in both cases,
there are legions of people who are resolute in their belief that the former
is doable while the latter is simply beyond their ability, and Sandra Lee
only feeds this belief. What she's done is taken the noble and laudable
mantra that beautiful, delicious food need not be a difficult time-consuming
chore, and somehow perverted and reshaped it into her own dark, twisted,
pre-processed vision.

What was most troubling about my afternoon viewing, however, was the
revelation that Semi-Homemade isn't some freaky interloper, but rather the
standard-bearer of the new daytime Food Network. I couldn't understand why
people held TV cooks like Rachel Ray and Giada De Laurentiis in such high
regard until I saw the shows they were sandwiched between. In the early
years, FoodTV shows sought to educate. They taught people that good food
needn't be this mystical other that was unattainable by mere mortals. You
learned that if you're short on time, don't make a half-assed chicken and
dumplings with heat-lamp chicken and canned biscuit dough. Take even less
time and make an incredibly fresh and delicious roast chicken or a simple
Italian sautéed chicken instead. But where Food Network used to encourage
its viewers' enthusiasm and desires, it now prefers to prey on its viewers'
fears and insecurities, focusing instead on "tricks" and "shortcuts" that
rarely save any real time or energy, but almost always sacrifice flavor.

I don't know anybody so food illiterate that they can't see the difference
between an average Sandra Lee meal and an average Mario Batali meal... but
they both took roughly 30 minutes to prepare.

Well, more for the Sandra Lee meal if you factor in your tablescape.