Semi-Homemade Cooking

Does the thought of cooking from scratch make you panic? Do you stand in front of your supermarket's canned vegetables display frozen with indecision? Is your fridge filled with takeout containers, and your oven used for storage? If you answered these questions with an emphatic "Yes," Sandra Lee's Semi-Homemade Cooking might be the cookbook for you.

There are plenty of excellent quick-and-easy cookbooks out there, but this book feels like a cross between a giant advertisement and one of those free recipe books you get with mail-in proofs of purchase. Every ingredient that can possibly be branded is labeled as such. Lee's Salad Chinois is made with Swanson premium chunk chicken breast, Kikkoman soy sauce, McCormick ground ginger, Hellman's or Best Foods mayonnaise, La Choy chow mein noodles, Fresh Express prepared green salad, Chun King chow mein vegetables, and Dole mandarin orange segments. Gnocchi Dippers are whipped up with Alessi gnocchi, Bertolli olive oil, and, believe it or not, Kraft Velveeta cheese. The Malibu Rum Cake includes Malibu Rum, Duncan Hines Moist Deluxe yellow cake mix, and Jell-O vanilla instant pudding. And not only does Lee dictate brand names, she chimes in with advice on music and wine selections, as well. One can only hope that Wolfgang Puck wrote the introduction to this book without ever seeing it. --Leora Y. Bloom