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Um..um..um. Now, THAT’S a culinary art. My mother's homemade chocolate pie each and every Christmas with mounds of real homemade unsweetened whipped cream. Yeah, I was the only girl in the family who didn't get the recipe and I was my mother's only child. I think she did that so I'd have to come and find her on the other side. "You want that recipe, kid? Come and find me." ;-)

My grandpa had the false modesty thing going. You have to realize that, first of all, this guy didn't strike you as the cook type. He was a hardcore southerner from rural Kentucky (and so is everyone else in the family, including me). He was in the Navy in WW2 and spent the following forty years working as an engineer for a couple of towboat outfits, finally retiring from Ingram Towing. This is when he picked up his cooking skills. He got the recipes from the cooks on the boat. He was hard, but friendly, had a good sense of humor and could cuss like a sailor because, hey, he was one.

Anyway, you've got a good picture of him now. Last year about this time, I'm sitting in my Meemaw's kitchen eating some of that wonderful pecan pie, and he comes ambling in from his perch in the living room after reading the paper. He takes a sidelong glance at my pie platter and says, 'bah! That pie ain't no count.'

This is exactly the same thing he's said about every single thing he's cooked for the past 25 years of my life, and probably for the entire length of his own life as well. And all of it was great no matter what he said.

So I looked at him and I said, "you know Pa, for as long as I can remember, all 25 of my years, you've said that about everything you've ever cooked."

He paused and considered this for a second, and finally nodded his head and said, "I know." Then he paused a second longer before he said, "But by God, this time it really ISN'T any count."

It took me an hour to quit laughing.