"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.

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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.

"In your last moments, are you going to think,'I should have have cooked from scratch?' I don't think so."

"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,........

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