Text the Peeps: Aunt Sandy Is Going Down Once More! by Jessica Friedman

Last weekend, Ian and I went home to visit our families and celebrate my father’s birthday. During our stay, we visited the local bookstore as we often do, and I came across an enemy of my past that has been cropping up EVERYWHERE recently: Sandra Lee.

As some of you are aware, I hate Sandra Lee with a passion, but that hatred had dwindled significantly while I was worrying about other aspects of my life (getting a job, getting married, staying married to Ian…lol). Lo and behold, Sandra came back into our lives with four holiday specials on HGTV that Ian and I tried to watch, but that were so horrific we could barely stay tuned. Sandra using former cancer patients for her benefit was SO exploitative it made me sick to my stomach (the terrifying red Christmas tree pictured above certainly didn’t help either), but after the holidays, I lost interest once again. Cablevision certainly didn’t help by shutting down Food Network and HGTV transmissions, effectively cutting Sandy out of our lives for the time being.

Anyway, while Ian and I were at the bookstore, I started rummaging through the displayed magazines and came across the Semi-Homemade winter magazine, complete with Sandra’s soulless eyes staring back at me. Here is a link to the Table of Contents:

http://www.semihomemademag.com/inthisissue.asp

I had to kill some time while Ian spent his usual half-hour staring at DVDs, so I started flipping through the pages and came across “Heirloom Easy” (e.g. how to take the good food your parents/grandparents made and turn it into crap quickly and easily).

One heirloom recipe for a brownie sundae is what finally pushed me over the edge and brought back my HATRED for this woman. Sandra’s brownies consisted of boxed brownie mix (nothing wrong with that, but certainly not “heirloom” unless her mother was Betty Crocker), some eXpresso (yes, that is misspelled on purpose since that is the way she pronounces it), basic ingredients for brownies (oil, water, egg), vanilla ice cream, and store-bought hot fudge and caramel sauce. That is IT. How in the world is this a “recipe,” let alone an heirloom recipe? How does this woman continue to amass a freakin’ empire when her recipes consist of desserts I could and did make when I was 8? Why is this woman dating a Cuomo and starring in two shows on the Food Network?

Ahem. To make a long story short, I am finally going to complete the task I set before me so many years ago and will finish defining the 9 Rings of Hell according to Sandra Lee’s cookbook for kids. If The Inferno is coming out with a new edition featuring a video game poster for its cover, than I better get on the bandwagon and publish my OWN version of Dante’s classic, Sandra Lee style. Each week, we will enter another ring of Sandy’s hell, so get ready to once again experience the terrifying depths of Sandra Lee’s ignorance about cooking, children, taste, etc.

In other words, Text the Peeps! Aunt Sandy is back!