"Isn't it pretty?" Sandra Lee asks me, and I have to agree. The Emmy Award-winning television host, author and coiner of the word "tablescape " is leading me, via Zoom, to a corner of her living room to show me one of her most prized possessions — the blue ribbon she won for display and design 32 years ago at the Los Angeles County Fair.
"That ribbon is 48 inches long. The head on that ribbon is 16 inches," she notes with the authority of someone accustomed to doing the math. "That ribbon is like the Kentucky Derby or the Westminster Kennel Show."
It's both an artifact of Lee's past and a talisman of her present. She is talking to me a few days before the launch of her latest series, the Netflix competition series "Blue Ribbon Baking Championship." The show, hosted by Jason Biggs, features blue ribbon winners from state fairs nationwide competing for a $100,000 prize.
Lee serves as executive producer and a judge. "Blue Ribbon" marks the second phase of Lee's return to television in a big way this year, after "Dinner Budget Showdown" debuted on the Roku Channel in May. Both shows are deeply personal for the "Semi-Homemade" icon, a woman who spent her childhood stretching pennies and much of her 20s traveling to state fairs and home shows as she built her first business, a drapery kits venture she called Kurtain Kraft.
Makeup-free and casually dressed in an ivory ensemble that matches her serene white living room, Lee radiates the gal's gal demeanor that has made her a television fixture, first via QVC and then with her Food Network series, "Semi-Homemade Cooking" and "Sandra's Money Saving Meals." At times, she drops her voice conspiratorially, as if we're friends sharing secrets.
She tells me that she loves my red hair. She pauses to report on a pod of dolphins swimming outside her oceanfront window. "I think it is mating season," she cracks. "The dolphins are having a grinder out there." Lee is clearly having a great old time too. But she is also, after several years away from her cooking and entertaining lane, very much here to talk about her work, and her singular goal of getting back to what she loves.
"When I came out of my fight in 2015, I said, what are my bucket list projects and priorities?' 'Blue Ribbon Baking Championship' was one of them," she says. "If it launches in one season or it stays for 20, I will be happy. But I will see it through."
The fight Lee is referring to is her diagnosis nine years ago of ductal carcinoma in situ, a precancerous condition that can lead to malignant breast cancer. "I had three little dots in three different areas unrelated," she recalls, "but by the time they got in there six weeks later, [my doctor] said it was everywhere. So I was extremely lucky."
Lee underwent a bilateral mastectomy, an experience she shared in her HBO documentary "Early Detection, A Cancer Journey with Sandra Lee." Two years ago, she had a complete hysterectomy to ensure "there won't be any more halo of worry hanging over my head." (A history of breast cancer can increase some women's risk for ovarian cancer.)
During that time, she leaned on a younger sibling for support. "I can't believe how desperately in need of my sister I was at that time," she says. "I'd always been the one that gave, gave, gave. But I really needed her and she was there."
A big-sister brand of caretaking was built into Lee from the start. When she was two, her teenage mother sent the Santa Monica-born Lee and her sister to live with her grandmother. It's where Lee learned the importance of budgeting — and the consolation of a loved one's kitchen.
"I wanted to be just like Grandma," she wrote in her 2007 memoir "From Scratch." Four years later, her mother returned with a new husband to claim the sisters. Three more siblings soon followed, and it wasn't long before Lee realized her parental figures, hampered by drug addiction and mental illness, were not equipped to care for them.
"At age 11, I became mom, sister, caretaker and homemaker of our family," she wrote in "From Scratch." Lee spent her childhood handling the welfare checks and food stamps, preparing meals and working odd jobs around her school hours. When I mention to Lee that many of us who grew up in unstable circumstances didn't know how unstable they truly were at the time, she says she had always been aware.
"I knew when I was standing at that register at that grocery store and Gertie Van Dyke was standing behind me with her mom, and they owned the dairy and she always had the prettiest clothes, and I'm pulling out a book of food stamps. I knew that it wasn't right, what was going on. I knew that when I was doing everything I could to get my siblings to school in the morning. That wasn't my job, I knew. But I also knew it was my job. And I knew that a lot of people were like me," she says. "I didn't realize how many people are like me."
At 16, Lee moved to Wisconsin to live with her birth father, a chapter that took another dark turn when he was arrested and imprisoned for sexually assaulting his then-girlfriend. What had been an awful and humiliating experience for a teenage girl to endure also became a powerful motivator. She got her own apartment at 17, and took charge of her life.
"There were a couple of moments where I wavered, and I had to look in the mirror and say, 'OK, who are you going to be, girl? What's your life going to look like? What road are you going to go down?" she says. "No one had that talk with me. I had that talk with me. I just decided that I was going to live a different life. And I was going to be happy."
While studying at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse a few years later, Lee's life took another dramatic turn. During a family visit, her aunt and uncle invited her to return to California with them. "It changed everything," says Lee.
She started working at home shows, first for Black+Decker and then for her own fledgling DIY window treatments business. "I went to the L.A. County Fair, and I won that blue ribbon," she remembers. "I went to the Del Mar fair in San Diego, and I paid off all my student loans. I bought a cargo van that I drove for half my 20s."
"It's not the sexiest thing, for a 25-year-old to be driving a white cargo van, so she can put all the props in there and all our booth displays in there and go into storage units and haul that stuff around," she acknowledges. Lee invested in an infomercial, and her telegenic presence gained attention. Soon, QVC and other retailers were at her door.
For a woman whose Wikipedia page cites her under "chef," Lee never especially aspired to the label. She came up in the world of crafts and decor. She's never run a restaurant. In her youth, she took one two-week course at Le Cordon Bleu in Ottawa, an experience that taught her exactly how she didn't want to work — in complicated technique, with fussy ingredients. Instead, she marched to the grocery aisle and had a lightbulb moment when she spied a bag of semisweet chocolate morsels.
Latching on to the emancipating power of the word "semi," she wrote a "Semi-Homemade" cookbook, and then another. She became a bestselling author. But when the Food Network came calling, as she told New York magazine in 2011, she didn't want to film a cooking show — she wanted to make a home-and-garden show instead. The network let her throw in her tablescapes, and she was in. There were some bumps along the way, like the infamous 2003 Kwanza cake. (Like the ghost of Marley, it returns every holiday season to haunt her.) "Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee" ran for 15 seasons.
Lee's arrival and ascent coincided with my first years of new motherhood. I can recall watching her on cable in the middle of the restless nights with crying babies, gazing somnambulantly at this perfect blonde creating perfect tablescapes in her perfect TV kitchen. She seemed to be everything that I, a shambling, spit up-stained wreck, was not. Yet what kept pulling me in was a profound sense of recognition. She used ingredients that came out of cans and boxes and tubes. She talked about cutting costs and saving money.
I grew up with cream of mushroom soup in the cupboard and Cool Whip in the fridge and orange juice from concentrate. I knew this woman. She wasn't Martha in Connecticut. She wasn't Gwyneth in Malibu. She was my grandmother, dragging me to the A&P with an envelope full of coupons in her pocketbook.
We live in a country where 74% of mothers work outside of the home, and yet the pressure to do it all, perfectly and beautifully, has only become more intense over time. My grandmother, a full-time homemaker, never had a moment's shame about making a pot roast with onion soup mix. Yet today, the dread — the embarrassment — of serving less than Instagram-worthy meals looms large.
When I tell Lee I've felt inadequate for popping a can of Pillsbury, she shakes her head. "There's a lot to feel guilty about," she says. "That's not one of them. What you have to do is really think about your priorities. When you're in your last moments, are you going to think 'Oh, s**t, I should have have cooked that from scratch?' I don't think so."
She believes those pervasive feelings of inadequacy are fueled by our omnipresent opportunities for comparison. "We all look at people that are absolutely perfect — or seemingly perfect — in the media," she says. "You don't know the optics of someone else's life. We all think that we do. You see JLo at her Bridgerton birthday party, you don't know if her heart is crushed and crumbling while she smiles and sucks up those tears. I had days like that. I had days where I was smiling and I was in full hair and makeup. I couldn't have looked happier. And inside, I was dying."
Lee smiled through her early days on the Food Network. But her unapologetic brand of shortcut-friendly getting-it-done was not embraced by the more rarified culinary community. This was, after all, the peak of "No Reservations" style "Yes, Chef" -ism, when cooking was supposed to be sexy and aggressive and a little bit dangerous. No wonder she attracted her share of "you can't sit with us" disdain.
Anthony Bourdain called her "Pure evil… the frightening Hell Spawn of Kathie Lee and Betty Crocker." The New York Times blanched that Lee's methods "give people an excuse for feeding themselves and their families mediocre food filled with preservatives" and called her "fairly close to offensive" for endorsing the convenience of paper plates and napkins. Lee, meanwhile, was a ratings and bookselling juggernaut.
Did the criticism hurt her? "A little bit," she admits, "but I also thought, you don't understand my audience. You haven't gone to a state fair. You don't have a blue ribbon. You don't understand what Middle America is going through." And Lee does. Even now, when she talks about the world of state fairs, she says, "I just don't feel like I'm any different than the girls that are still there."
That identification goes both ways with her audience. Her all-too-common hardscrabble origin story has only deepened the connection. She may have a chandelier in her living room now, but Lee's understanding of what it's really like to struggle to make ends meet, and the deep need to hang on to your dignity and joy in the hardest moments, is tangible.
Yet Lee's personal story wasn't always part of her brand — only after she became a Food Network star did she come forward with the difficult details. "I had no intention of telling my story," she says. "And it was really, really hard the first time I did it. I couldn't hold it together. It makes me cry to think about it now, just sharing that."
Her voice cracks, clearly emotional. "It wasn't about being ashamed. It was just about speaking it. I just wanted to do well, I wanted my family to do well. I wanted our kids to be educated, I want everybody happy. And they are."
Her use of the phrase "our kids" is sincere and expansive. Despite spending most of her childhood raising her siblings and becoming a self-described "weekend mom" for several years to her ex-partner Andrew Cuomo's daughters, Lee has long been clear that she didn't crave traditional motherhood for herself. So when I ask her about the current discourse over the value of people who don't have traditional families, she is thoughtful.
"First of all, it's not for any of us to judge another person," she says. "That's God's job. Our job is to help one another and to uplift one another."
She wonders, "What part of that makes the world a better place? And if you're not making the world a better place, then what are you doing here? What's your purpose? Do something of value that contributes to the human race and the animal race, because animals are people, too. I really want to say honestly, knock it the f**ck off."
For Lee, doing something to make the world better has frequently taken the form of leveraging her knowledge of how it actually works. While serving as New York State's de facto first lady, she pushed for a "No Excuses" bill to improve early breast cancer detection access and care, including extending testing center hours. Lee understands that for all the emphasis on "the cure," breast cancer is first and foremost about the overextended real woman facing it.
"Early detection is everything for longevity and management," she says. "I knew firsthand that where I came from, none of those women would have survived. I'm not even sure I would. It moves so fast."
Nearly a decade on, Lee's diagnosis and treatment continue to impact her deeply. "I was really surprised by the people who came out, and I was really surprised at some of the actions of people behind the scenes," she says. "I was shocked that after that diagnosis, Food Network canceled my show."
Lee was diagnosed in 2015 and her show ended in 2016. "I lost some of my spokespersonships," Lee says. "I was shocked at how much grief and anger I had, and how sick I was. And I was delightfully surprised at the friends I had, and how deep their connections to me were. It was very revealing to me what was in my life, and what was not."
Despite her painful beginnings and the ups and downs she's survived, Lee sticks with her mission to lead a happy life. When I ask her about the people who've hurt her along the way, she says, "I don't think about it most days. But when I think about it, it still makes me cry."
She admits, "I'm not sure I'm totally over the pain. I'm not sure that forgiveness is the word, as opposed to just coping and digesting. And using your frustration and those moments of agony to fuel your purpose and your place, and to cement your conviction of how you want to live your life — and how you don't want to be."
Lee is now facing forward, ready to make up for any time lost to medical issues and the pandemic. "I haven't worked in eight years," she admits.
But coming back to TV wasn't about the money, she says. "Coming back was about getting the goals that I set for myself to accomplish."
She describes "Blue Ribbon Baking" as "a heartstring." Over a decade ago, she started looking for what was missing in the competitive TV landscape. She wanted to take the genre back to its origins. Enter the state fair.
"That is where food competitions originated from. But for some reason, God never hands me a softball. He's like, 'OK, if you want to do this, you’re going to have to really do it. And you’re going to have to bring a nation with you.'"
And after "Blue Ribbon"? She has some thoughts. She told The Hollywood Reporter recently that she's got "15 ideas for shows in my binders" created during the pandemic. She dreams of one day hanging a Christmas wreath on the White House door. When I ask if that dream depends on who is on the other side of that door, she says firmly, "No, that dream is dependent on me. I will hang that wreath on the White House someday before I leave this planet."
And, like everything else in the semi-homemade life of a woman who's never done anything halfway, Lee says, "And that is up to me."
