Right before author, QVC home-crafts maven, and unabashed Cheez Whiz booster Sandra Lee is introduced to 100 or so members of the Junior League of Pasadena, she gets a case of the jitters. Sitting at an umbrella-shaded table in the pristine backyard of a private estate here, she shuffles the palm-dampened pages of her speech. “I looked up the Junior League on the Internet,” Lee confesses nervously. Her postcard-blue eyes quickly scan an audience largely composed of wealthy, middle-aged women in sleeveless silk dresses and floppy garden-party hats. “I thought this would be a younger crowd.”
You can’t help thinking that Martha Stewart would have known what to expect. The comparison springs to mind because at this stage in Lee’s career, “Stewart” is practically a part of her name. At 36, she has been called “the next Martha Stewart,” “the down-to-earth Martha Stewart,” “the anti-Martha Stewart.” “Our Martha Stewart” is the pet descriptor preferred by Miramax Films’ Harvey Weinstein, whose book division published Lee’s 2002 New York Times best-seller Semi-Homemade Cooking: Quick Marvelous Meals and Nothing Is Made from Scratch, as well as her second book, Semi-Homemade Desserts, which goes on sale next month.
Stewart and Lee could certainly be filed under the same general categories (“Cooking,” “Home Decorating and Entertaining,” “Blond Hair”). But the gospel Lee is preaching this afternoon is aimed at the trying-to-do-it-all wife and mother who lacks the money, hand-eye coordination, and huge swaths of time necessary to tackle Stewart’s ambitious projects. (The coordination issue alone could earn Lee the anti-Martha label, given the way she repeatedly extols to the Junior Leaguers the relaxing virtues of wine, wine, and more wine—or Margaritas—at the end of every day.)
Very early in her talk, Lee announces the secret to her trademarked Semi-Homemade philosophy: 30 percent fresh ingredients, 70 percent prepared foodstuffs available on any supermarket shelf. Not only is her method quick and foolproof, she says, but four-star restaurants surreptitiously subscribe to it as well. “We go to the grocery store and we all feel guilty because we’re not doing it from scratch,” says Lee. “Can I tell you something? These big kitchens buy the exact same product with a different flavor and they call it a commercial line.” Then she pauses dramatically. “They’re not making bouillabaisse, either. They’re not. None of these guys are doing it. Not the most recognized chefs in the world.”
The all-gal audience nods in amazement at this oversimplification of the truth. In front of each woman is a version of Lee’s Raspberry Trifle with Rum Sauce. Resting at the bottom of a wineglass is Sara Lee pound cake that has been cut into small cubes, topped with a couple of large yellow scoops of vanilla Jell-O pudding, and garnished with fresh raspberries. My serving of trifle, though, has been mistakenly rushed out before the addition of pudding and fruit. I am staring at a glass of chunks of store-bought cake. Even in its fully embellished form, though, is this a recipe or just a serving tip?
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Lee’s message is directed at “people who want the illusion of cooking when they don’t have the time or are too intimidated,” says Marion Nestle, the head of the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University, who believes that Lee’s 70-30 principle isn’t the beginning of the end but perhaps the beginning of the beginning. “Thirty per cent is better than none,” says Nestle. “That’s a start. Maybe if they put in forty percent, it’ll taste better and you’re on your way. Maybe it’s a slippery slope in the right direction.”
No one would be frightened to attempt Lee’s Golden Mushroom Soup recipe, which appears on page 149 in her first book. In it, she has the reader open a can of Campbell’s Golden Mushroom Soup, then lightly doctor it with three quarters of a cup of heavy cream and a chopped portabella mushroom that has been sautéed in Bertolli olive oil with a teaspoon of McCormick minced garlic. She swears the stipulating of brands isn’t paid endorsement. “There’s a difference in taste,” says Lee, whose cookbooks are virtually polka-dotted with the ® symbol. But what’s wrong with mincing fresh garlic? “Blech! It’s messy and it smells!” she tells me, dismissing the suggestion with a dazzling smile and a good-natured wave of her hand.
Classical training isn’t for Lee, either. Back in 1998, she took a two-week course at the Cordon Bleu in Ottawa, Canada. And that was when she had her Semi-Homemade brainstorm. “I was scraping beef tendons and I thought, ‘I’m outta here!’ ” she says. “When you look at a recipe you want to know that at least four of the ingredients are available at your grocery store. It’s more cost-effective and less time-consuming.”
It’s easy to trace the path from Lee’s childhood to her love of instant cooking. When she was only nine and living in Sumner, Washington, her mother was too ill to do much more than commute between her bed and the living room couch. So Lee cooked, cleaned, and watched after her four younger siblings. What kind of menus does an inventive grade-schooler dream up? “I used a lot of Bisquick,” Lee tells me a week after her Pasadena appearance, sitting at a rooftop table at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills and dressed in a white T-shirt, sparkly Sonia Rykiel jeans, and navy blue Belgian loafers.
She took her can-do spirit national when she was in her early twenties. At the time, her waitressing job left her with no budget for decorating the room she rented in a Malibu, California, beach house. So she fashioned a crownlike wire gizmo and turned her quarters into a pink-curtained Victoria’s Secret–style boudoir. A visiting relative saw the possibilities in the device and urged her to hawk it from a booth at the L.A. County Fair. The rest of Lee’s story is dizzying: Within a couple of years, her home decorating kit—known as Sandra Lee Kraft Kurtains—made her enough money on the county-fair circuit to finance a television commercial and a how-to video. Target and Wal-Mart came calling. QVC took one look at Lee—who is 5' 9", model-pretty, and talks faster than a carnival barker—and realized they’d found a new star.
In her first 18 months on QVC, Lee peddled product worth $20 million. Since then, she’s invented 157 other items. Ideas seem to bubble out of her continuously. Promoting the broiled fish in chive sauce dish she calls Tropical Salmon, she says, “You can’t screw it up. It’s a great date plate.” Suddenly, a lightbulb goes off. “Hey, date plate. That’s a good line,” says Lee, diving into her purse for a pen and a piece of paper.
Last June, Lee entered into a multimedia partnership with Miramax Films. The plan is to push the Sandra Lee Semi-Homemade brand in every conceivable direction—pots, pans, shower curtains, magazines, TV. Currently, Lee has her husband of two years, Southern California home-building mogul Bruce Karatz, programming the TiVo box at their Bel Air home to record every cooking show on cable. That way, his wife can research her upcoming home-and-cooking series on the Food Network. On it, she will continue to bang the 70-30 drum.
One sure guest appearance will be Kraft Cheez Whiz, which Lee defends so persuasively that I buy a jar to make her Six-Cheese Tortellini. I can see that 70-30 might make sense in the modern world, but it’s at this point that I begin to wonder why the 70 element has to involve such head-scratching items as processed cheese spread. It takes two days of soaking to remove the rubbery film the substance leaves on my saucepan, so I can only imagine what it’s doing to my insides. What is it about Cheez Whiz that Lee finds so appealing?
“The flavor, the texture, and the consistency,” she says, refusing to back down. “Add some wine, some salsa, heat it up, and you’ve got a dip. Delicious!”