Sandra 'Semi-Homemade' Lee: New York's Next First Lady or Girlfriend?

Andrew Cuomo, the New York attorney general, and Sandra Lee, the Food Network's foxy star of "Semi-Homemade," were a relatively discreet item for four years, even as they lived together in a Manhattan apartment.

While he prosecutes Wall Street criminals and other miscreants around the state, she shows millions of viewers how pre-shredded cheese, bottled dressing, and cream-of-whatever soup can turn mealtime drudgery into manageable, if middlebrow, feasts. And man, can she set a table. This is clearly a woman who never met a centerpiece, holiday-themed china, or festive candlesticks she did not like.

Small wonder she has touted herself as Martha Stewart for the masses. The duo -- he's 51, she's 43 -- might have continued in relative obscurity had Cuomo not decided to run again for governor. Thus has the limelight begun shining ever more brightly on "Sandrew," whose romance was plumbed in depth by the New York Post in December as his chances of winning the top job kept improving.

Now The Daily Beast has weighed in, reminding us yet again that the personal and professional narratives of Sandy and Andy, two good-looking divorcees, is one compelling tale.

If elected, Bill Clinton's former secretary of Housing and Urban Development, who bailed out of an earlier, dismal gubernatorial race, will continue the family legacy in Albany begun by his father, Mario Cuomo, who was governor in the 1980s. Young Andrew, a politically driven lawyer from a close-knit Italian-American family, had a fairy tale marriage to Kerry Kennedy -- a daughter of Camelot princeling Bobby Kennedy and Ethel. But it blew apart in 2003, when Cuomo learned he'd been cuckolded by a polo playing friend. The exes share custody of three daughters, now in their early teens.

Lee is the self-made Home Ec heroine whose soap opera childhood included maternal abandonment and neglect, an abusive stepfather, a real Dad in prison, and early on, a gritty determination to nurture and nourish her younger siblings on groceries bought with food stamps. She took cooking classes at the Cordon Bleu in Ottowa, and she invented Kurtain Kraft, a system for making budget window treatments -- without gluing or sewing!! -- that she pitched on QVC. She later went to work for megabuilder KB Home, ultimately marrying its very rich CEO, Bruce Karatz. Tiring, she later said, of an empty life of furs, five-star Paris hotels, and yacht trips in the Mediterranean, she got a divorce and a reported settlement in the mid-eight figures. And still she worked, persevering in that sexy, perky way of hers, writing cookbooks and launching a TV show.

If she is bothered by the merciless insults from serious chefs and food writers about her reliance on heavily processed, additive-laden products that may in fact cost far more than raw ingredients, you'd never know it. In what might be considered a serious case of culinary chutzpah, her "semi-homemade" lasagna for her beau, the grandson of an Italian grocer, calls for canned tomato soup and cottage cheese. Mama mia!

But Lee can make quite the impression on those not easily impressed, including Tina Brown, who runs the Daily Beast but first met the TV chef as editor-in-chief of Talk/Miramax books. "Sandra Lee showed up at Miramax Books with so much dynamism I had to lie down after every meeting," Brown said. "She had this wonderful raw energy which, combined with the long legs and blond hair and a claim to be the blue-collar Martha Stewart, caused her to walk out of there with a two-book deal with Harvey Weinstein."

Lee seems to have had a similar effect on Cuomo, whom she met at a party in Southampton -- you expected maybe the Staten Island ferry? -- at the home of a mutual friend's mother. Lee was on a post-divorce visit from L.A. Cuomo arrived with his three girls. Not long after, the duo began dating. It took them two years to admit publicly to the romance.

Now the speculation has begun on the sort of First Lady Sandra Lee might become, or whether they will even marry. Lee has said she would help Cuomo campaign for the governorship, but that does not mean she'll give up her show or her empire should he win.

"Will you still cook once you get to the governor's mansion?" TV host Wendy Williams asked Lee during an interview last year.

"I will cook," Lee said. "And do you know what I'm going to bring when I go to the governor's mansion? Great garnishes."

Let's hear it for maraschino cherries and plasti-packs of parsley.