Keeping Secrets!

              Cooking Television Personalities make it look easy. Super-Chefs publish Cookbooks with gorgeous photographs intended, it seems, for display on coffee tables. Beautiful barefoot kitchen divas prance through their kitchens in designer aprons. Their presentations, the cute white ramkins containing just the right ingredients at precise measurement…it’s enough to send the Viking Cooking School onto Fortune 500.  But, these stars rarely share any proven recipe “secrets.”  Some cooks purposefully “leave out” that one special ingredient when sharing a recipe, so the novice will always wonder what she did wrong!
              I watched my mother-in-law and wrote her recipe for “sweet rolls” and modifications thereof, such as cinnamon rolls and “sticky buns.”  There is a huge temptation to take commercially prepared Sister Schubert rolls in the aluminum pan, flip out her delicious treats in one fat-filled circle, doctor them up and call it a day, because it takes patience to watch yeast in action, more than we instantaneous types prefer. 
                 All that is prelude to a kitchen confession:  my pies have not turned out as they should have this year.  I blamed it on altitude and latitude, just like I blame my forgetfulness on “time change.”  Wrong!  Did you know that you can add too much sugar to a recipe?  How wrong is that! Mother’s secret ingredients:  “a pinch of sugar” and “Mexican vanilla.” Her mantra:  “If a pinch is good, a couple of pinches more would be even better!” Instinct and inherited nature compel me to follow her lead in my cooking since I first discovered what went on in “that cute little room.” 
                 So, yesterday, over lunch, we were discussing shelling pecans when I zeroed in on conversation about whipping up a pecan pie.  I garnered 2 prize-winning tips.  These two tips seared into my brain and I could not wait to experiment.  I sacrificed the pie shells I had set aside for chicken pot pie to 2 pecan pies, or as I call them “Karo-nut pies.”  One pie went to the Soup and Sandwich Night at church; the other we kept for ourselves.
              Best pecan pies I have ever made.  Period. 

              I am not a sexy, barefoot, kitchen maven, but I do have my secrets!