Pat Buck has learned one thing in his 33-year marriage to Sara: If she cooks some new dish and you really, really like it, don’t tell her. “She won’t ever fix it again,” Pat says.

It isn’t that she’s being difficult.

“I guess it’s just that once I find something that’s good, I’m ready to move on and try some other new thing, to see if I can find something else everybody likes,” Sara says.

Of course, there are some exceptions—dishes that the family demands repeats on—and it’s some of those recipes that Sara shares with us this month in “The Country Kitchen.”

The funny thing is that, as fantastic as her recipes are, Sara’s never before had the nerve to put any of them in print. It’s not that she minds sharing; she just doesn’t want people to think she came up with the recipes on her own.

“None of my recipes are originals,” Sara says. “Every recipe that I have came from a friend, or from some recipe book or magazine. Most of them I’ve changed up a good bit to suit our taste, but I don’t have any ‘original’ recipes.”

Pat and Sara live in the town of Emelle, Sara’s lifelong home and the spot where a young Pat arrived back in ‘66 as a Missouri native who headed south to buy some cheap land and grow soybeans.

Sara was a schoolteacher when she and Pat married, but she gave that job up when their first child, Tally, was born. Later, when she returned to the workforce, it was as a rural mail carrier. She’s going on 28 years in that role, logging 105 miles a day, come rain, hail, sleet or snow.

The Bucks have two grown children: Grant, who works with his dad on their soybean and cattle operation, and Tally Buck Young, who lives in Trussville and who next month is scheduled to give Pat and Sara their first grandbaby. And some day, mark our words, that little girl will be bragging to her friends that her grandmother is the best cook in the whole wide world.