Sandra Lee's Evolution Is Seriously Turning Heads

Long before TikTok and other corners of social media started teaching you how to pull together a quick and easy meal with minimal effort, there was Sandra Lee. The former Food Network presenter spent 15 seasons fronting "Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee," where she was best known for using what she often estimated as 70% prepackaged goods and 30% fresh food to make the fastest, tastiest, most convenient dishes possible.

Like all celebrity chefs, Lee didn't just spring up out of nowhere to share accessible cooking tips with the world. The road to "Semi-Homemade Cooking" — and the path tread by Lee since the show ended in 2011 — took some unexpected turns along the way. Prior to teaching audiences how to make burgers out of chicken, cherries, and baguettes or use pasta sauce as a marinade, Lee's tragic life story included scraping together food stamps and welfare payments to feed her siblings and launching a décor business to make a name for herself. So, how did she get to where she is today? From humble beginnings to fronting her own Netflix show, let's take a tour through Sandra Lee's evolution over the years.

Sandra Lee is the eldest of five but, beginning at a young age, she acted more like their mother than their sister. When she was two years old, Lee's mother, Vicky Svitak, dropped Lee and her sister off at their paternal grandmother's house in Santa Monica, promising to come back soon — only to stay away for several years. "I started calling Grandma Lorraine 'Mommy,' and Vicky became a distant memory," Lee recalled in her memoir, "Made from Scratch" (via ABC News).

Four years later, Svitak finally returned to reclaim her daughters alongside her new husband, Richard Christiansen, with whom she had three more children. But after Christiansen left Svitak, Lee was forced to witness her mother "lying on the couch, taking pills and screaming at us." This left her with no option but to step up and become a parental figure for her younger siblings. "I was 9 years old and' I became the sole caretaker of our family," she wrote in her memoir (via Out). "By age 12 I was doing all the laundry, cooking, cleaning, and grocery shopping."

Sandra Lee's childhood was undeniably challenging. However, it did introduce her to a concept that would later serve as a springboard for her entire career: making cooking as simple as possible. During the years that Lee was forced to provide for her siblings, she grew accustomed to scrambling to provide meals. She primarily fed her siblings through a combination of food stamps and welfare payments, which she needed to stretch as far as possible. "We made simple bargain cuisine, not because we wanted to, but because we had to," she wrote in her memoir

Years later, when Lee fronted the show "Money Saving Meals" in 2009 during the Great Recession, Bob Tuschman — the then vice president of programming for the Food Network — highlighted her experience in making a lot with little as one of the reasons she was the perfect host. "She has struggled," he told Newsweek. "Even though she has been successful, she knows what it feels like just to have to try to get food on the table."

Surprisingly, Sandra Lee's first career success wasn't related to food. In her junior year at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, Lee returned to California to be close to her aunt and uncle, who'd previously tried to adopt Lee and her sister, Cindy. It was while decorating her rented room in Malibu with a piece of pink fabric she'd fashioned into makeshift curtains that her uncle suggested she try her hand at starting a business. She later launched Sandra Lee Kraft Kurtains. "I used old wire coat hangers to create hooks and loops that I wove fabric around and created valances and curtain panels," Lee explained to Vogue.

Lee managed to save $50,000 to create infomercials to promote the Los Angeles-based business. It was worth the effort, as she was later recruited by QVC, which sent Kraft Kurtains into the stratosphere. By the end of 1993, Kraft Kurtains had raked in over $6 million and Lee was promoting it all over the world. Her stint on QVC was further serendipitous, as it was there that Lee caught the eye of someone at the Food Network.

Most famous foodies got their start at culinary school. Sandra Lee is no exception, even if it inspired her slightly differently than you'd expect. After traveling widely to promote Kraft Kurtains, Lee was exposed to gourmet food for the first time. She decided to sign up for a short course at a Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Canada to help her work through the grief that came with her grandmother's death.

As she told Vogue, the course taught her the basics of fine cuisine. "We cooked bouillabaisse for a whole week," she said. "It was a total waste of time." That may have been an over-exaggeration, as Lee admitted that it did teach her the art of condensing recipes into their simplest form — a skill she judged far more useful to impart upon regular folks looking to up their skills in the kitchen. "Instead of making truffles from scratch, I realized I could use premade chocolate icing, adding extra confectioners' sugar and vanilla extract," she explained.

After returning to Los Angeles, Lee began working on her first cookbook, "Semi-Homemade — Cooking, Fast and Fabulous," which established her as a maven of quick and easy meals.

It was around the time of "Semi-Homemade — Cooking, Fast and Fabulous" that Sandra Lee first met with now-disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein. In the early 2000s, over a decade before Weinstein would be convicted as a sex offender, the pair were introduced through mutual connections. His production company Miramax agreed to publish Lee's first cookbook and kickstart her television and merchandising career. "We're really excited about working with Sandra Lee on building a successful brand that incorporates her sensible lifestyle approach into books, television, and other merchandise," said Weinstein in 2002 (via Writers Write). "Sandra is a great talent who has all the necessary ingredients and a recipe for success."

The pair's relationship seemed to stay strong as the years passed. In 2016 (one year before The New York Times published the exposé that helped trigger Weinstein's downfall), Lee shared a picture of the pair at a gala on Facebook. Her caption praised the producer as her "Magic Man" who served as a "catalyst to my career who catapulted Semi Homemade into a household name!"

After Kurtain Kraft's success, Sandra Lee was named a spokesperson for construction company KB Home in 1999. Two years later, she married the company's then-chairman and CEO, Bruce Karatz, who was 21 years older than Lee. This also effectively ended his first marriage — which included cashing out up to $30 million in stock options for the divroce settlement — months before they tied the knot.

During their marriage, Lee converted to Judaism and became actively involved in charity work. However, within just four years, things had soured. In May 2005, Lee filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. Their divorce was finalized in 2006, the same year Karatz abruptly resigned from the position he had held since 1986. It was eventually revealed that he had illegally awarded himself and other KB Home executives compensation from undisclosed stock options. Karatz was convicted of federal fraud, for which he was sentenced to 2,000 hours of community service, five years of probation, and eight months of house arrest (in his 24-room mansion in Bel Air, poor guy), and ordered to pay a $1 million fine.

"Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee" was no flash in the pan for the Food Network. After premiering in October 2003, the show ran for 15 seasons before wrapping up in 2011. While it definitely wasn't for everyone (more on that in a bit), the appeal was obvious. Lee's cooking philosophy of using 70% prepackaged products and 30% fresh foods gave busy viewers the permission — nay, encouragement — to cheat a little when it came to whipping up a tasty meal.

The show racked up impressive numbers during its run, debuting in the top three new weekend shows on Food Network and maintained this spot for its first five years. "It wound up being the highest-rated new show launched in the history of the network," Lee told TIME in 2019. 

While she was perfectly aware of the disdain with which some foodies viewed her cooking advice, Lee was insistent that her show helped people by providing shortcuts not only for meals but hosting. A particularly popular section of "Semi-Homemade Cooking" saw Lee put together a grand tablescape (a now commonly-used term that Lee herself reportedly coined) inspired by each episode's meal. Like her food, these rarely required elaborate components. "It doesn't have to be china and silver," Lee told TIME. "It can be paper and plastic and still be extraordinary."

In the eyes of many culinary experts, Sandra Lee's reliance on packaged foods was an affront to the art of cooking. Iconic chef Anthony Bourdain was a longtime and particularly acidic critic. A now-deleted guest post on fellow cook Michael Ruhlman's blog claimed that Lee was "Pure evil. This frightening Hell Spawn of Kathie Lee and Betty Crocker seems on a mission to kill her fans, one meal at a time."

Bourdain wasn't one to mince words, but he also wasn't the only one to shade Lee or "Semi-Homemade Cooking." In 2003, Lee was blasted for her now-infamous Kwanzaa Cake. Lee marked the annual celebration of African-American culture by combining store-bought angel food cake with icing, cinnamon, apple pie filling, pumpkin seeds, and corn nuts (none of which have much to do with Kwanzaa). The backlash was fierce. Bourdain called it nothing less than "a war crime" (via Eat Me Daily). Meanwhile Jessica Harris, author of the cookbook "A Kwanzaa Keepsake," told Salon, "The thing that's potentially offensive to me is characterizing/determining a holiday about which neither the cake preparer nor the recipe designer has the first clue."

Seven years after the episode aired, author Denise Vivaldo revived Kwanzaa Cake-gate by claiming in The Huffington Post that she was the recipe's ghostwriter. She also took the opportunity to allege that Lee has "incredibly bad food taste" (via SheKnows). Lee's lawyers didn't take this lightly, threatening legal action and having the article removed.

After Sandra Lee's marriage to Bruce Karatz broke down, she began a new relationship with a now rather well-known person: Andrew Cuomo, who became the 56th Governor of New York in 2011. The pair first met in 2005 when Lee's close friends, political adviser Alexandra Stanton, introduced them at a cocktail party. Cuomo was also fresh off a divorce, having split from Kerry Kennedy.

What followed was a 14-year relationship in which Lee was considered the Semi-First Lady of New York. The pair never married (hence why Lee was informally styled the "Semi-First Lady") and remained relatively private during their time together. "I have a partner who feels the exact same way as I do about protecting our personal relationship," Lee told Harper's Bazaar in 2011. However, in true first lady style, she did embrace philanthropic work and was open about her close relationship with Cuomo's three daughters.

Then, Lee and Cuomo split in 2019. Once again, this wasn't a drama-free breakup for Lee. While she remained quiet about why they broke up, Lee cryptically told Page Six in 2024 that Cuomo made a comment to her in 2019 that closed "every window" in their relationship. Two years after Cuomo and Lee went their separate ways, Cuomo was accused of sexual harassment and misconduct by at least 13 women, with a purported insider telling the New York Post that Cuomo had been unfaithful to Lee.

Between 2001 and 2013, Sandra Lee penned over 25 cookbooks. She's also turned to other kinds of writing, releasing her memoir, "Made From Scratch," in 2007 and a romance novel titled "The Recipe Box" in 2013. The latter caused a stir upon its release. Its plot follows Grace Holm-D'Angelo, a recently divorced single mother who returns to her hometown to reconnect with her own mother, rediscover her love of cooking, and rekindle a romance with a man named Mike Lund.

Many presumed that it was inspired by Lee's relationship with Andrew Cuomo, with whom she was still in a relationship at the time. Several details (such as the love interest's appearance and the lead's pet cockatoo, an animal that Cuomo once gave to Lee as a gift) did serve as suspicious parallels to real life. While Lee admitted that the book took some cues from her firsthand experience, she stopped short of ever admitting Cuomo's influence. Appearing on Today, she instead noted that "both Mike Lund — the character, the love interest — and my sweetheart are very attractive men."

In 2015, Sandra Lee was leaving a photoshoot when she received the news nobody wants to hear: she had ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), a form of early-stage breast cancer. She quickly turned to the PBS series "Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies" to learn more. As she later told Good Housekeeping, "I started to understand how aggressive cancer is, and I decided to fight back just as aggressively."

After undergoing a double mastectomy, Lee was declared cancer-free that same year. Since then, she's pushed for greater awareness of breast cancer and the resources she wished she had access to when she was diagnosed. In 2018, she produced the documentary "Rx: Early Detection — A Cancer Journey With Sandra Lee," following her disease from diagnosis to recovery. With the help of Andrew Cuomo, she pushed for the No Excuses law in New York, making it easier for women to access breast cancer screenings. She's also advocated for other states to follow suit.

If you feel like Sandra Lee had joined the ranks of forgotten once-popular chefs for a while, you're not wrong. Lee described her cancer diagnosis as "a leveling moment" which made her confront both her personal life and the idea of aging (via Los Angeles Times). The next few years snowballed, with Lee grappling not only with her split from Cuomo, but the struggling health of her beloved Uncle Bill and Aunt Peg, the same couple who had tried to adopt her many years ago.

While her uncle suffered from cancer and heart disease, her aunt struggled with dementia. Lee spent several years caring for both, as well helping her Uncle Bill cross items off his bucket list, which included renewing his wedding vows. Both passed away in 2023. Lee took to Instagram to honor her uncle, describing him as "my mentor, my protector, my facilitator, my confidant, my best friend." She also praised him and Peggy for supporting her career, noting on Instagram that the latter "helped me believe in me."

Two years after splitting from Andrew Cuomo, Lee met Algerian actor Ben Youcef. Lee was dining at a restaurant in Santa Monica when Youcef – 13 years her junior — approached her and invited her out on a walk. From the get-go, Lee could tell there was something between them. "Meeting Ben was incredible," she told Us Weekly. "It was the perfect intersection of timing and chemistry."

But Lee was apprehensive. As she told Us Weekly, she was intimidated at the prospect of a new romance after years of being single. Fortunately, things appear to have run smoothly for the couple ever since. Now engaged, Lee's Instagram is a highlight reel of their cutest moments and she's publicly gushed about the strength of their relationship. "We trust each other completely, she told E! News in 2022. "There's no question that we can't ask each other and the other one won't be completely forthcoming."

As of 2024, Sandra Lee's TV comeback is in full swing. Not only does she host Roku's "Dinner Budget Showdown," but she's also a judge on "Blue Ribbon Baking Championship," a competition series that sees bakers who have previously won the prized blue ribbon from state fairs across the U.S. compete to win the ultimate blue ribbon, plus $100,000.

Lee shares her judging position with Bill Yosses, former Executive Pastry Chef for the White House. However, her role extends well beyond judging. Lee came up with the show's concept herself, having been inspired by "The Great British Bake Off" to apply the same model to the intense world of state and county fairs (where Lee herself once won a prized blue ribbon). 

Getting the show commissioned didn't happen overnight. Before Netflix gave it the green light, Lee pitched "Blue Ribbon Baking Championship" multiple times and was repeatedly told that it wouldn't work. But as Lee pointed out to the Los Angeles Times, this isn't always as a bad thing. "They said 'Semi-Homemade' wouldn't work either," she said.