-- Shares Facebook Twitter Reddit Email "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. Related "Cooking saved my life more than once": Chef Einat Admony on her culinary memoir "Taste of Love" Makeup-fr.