“We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.” ~David Mamet
Well, I’ve had my success in the mystery photo game this time. Now if you all get the last two right, it will be fine because I completely tricked you on this Number 3 picture. I really thought you’d get it, and while most all of you were in the kitchen hunting something to eat, you didn’t hunt the right thing. Bacon came in as the most popular guess. Some of you were pretty certain you were right. A few of you picked pancakes with syrup and without and Sandi said waffles which is nearly a pancake. Emily said peanut butter sandwich and Lauren and Connie said cake that Patty had chocolate frosting for. Pretzels got a few votes and chocolate showed some of us have a sweet tooth. Several saw wood bark or shingles, Amy thought it was a chair back spindle. I had to admire Eileen’s imagined mud with tracks in it and again Marji came up with a great imaginative guess – my granddaughter’s bangs. Maybe I’ll try that next mystery photo game so keep that in mind. You were right to be hunting through the kitchen pantry for an answer, but you never hit on the right one.
So, do you say PEE-can or puh-KAHN?
I’ve tried it both ways, but puh-KAHN sounds right to me. After my daughter moved south a few states she said she had a PEE-can tree in her back 
yard because that’s how the folks around her said pecan.
However you say it, I love pecans when I go to cooking desserts. I just picked a zucchini out of the garden. I can make a zucchini cake and load it down with pecans. And I love a good pecan pie. When I used to go with my husband to a lot of church dinners on the grounds when they had more of those with gospel music in the afternoon, I always looked for the pecan pies on the dessert table. It’s hard to go wrong with a piece of pecan pie.
We used to have an older lady at our church who made hickory nut pies. She picked up the hickory nuts and cracked and picked out the nuts for those pies. And we loved her for it. Well, we loved her lots of other reasons too, but we did get in line early for those pies at our own church dinners. Mom made those pies with hickory nuts too because thrifty country women didn’t buy pecans. They picked up hickory nuts and substituted.
Another really good use of some good pecans is in Mexican Wedding Cookies. One time when my granddaughter wanted to make something different while she was visiting, we found a recipe for those wedding cookies and she found a new favorite recipe. Those things are so good you can eat a dozen without thinking twice. Maybe you are thinking twice. Thinking about how delicious they are. I could share the recipe for the pecan pie, but you can buy a bottle of Karo syrup and there it is. At least that’s the one I use. So to celebrate my nutty mystery picture success, here’s that Mexican Wedding Cookie recipe.
MEXICAN WEDDING COOKIES
1 cup butter, softened 1/2 cup powdered sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt 2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon vanilla 3/4 cup of chopped pecans
Cream the butter and powdered sugar together. Add flour and salt mixture. Then stir in vanilla and chopped pecans. Chill if dough is too soft. Make 1 1/4 inch balls and place on parchment paper or ungreased backing sheet. Cook at preheated 400 degree oven for 10-12 minutes until cookies are light golden-brown. Remove from oven, cool slightly and then roll in powdered sugar until evenly coated. Then cool cookies completely on wire racks.
Now it’s your turn.
To throw your name in my giveaway hat for the chance to win a couple of books, your choice of one of mine and a grab bag book, just make a guess. Doesn’t have to be a right guess although I don’t think this post’s picture will trick you as good as Wednesday’s nutty one did. One more mystery picture on Wednesday and then next Sunday I’ll pick the winners and contact them by e-mail. So deadline to enter is Saturday night, July 18, 2020 at midnight EST. Each time you guess on a new mystery picture you get a new entry in the drawing. And if you have some pecans in the cupboard, make something yummy. Or just eat a few right out of your hand. That’s what I did with these. 🙂
What is mystery picture number 4?
And how do you say pecan – PEE-can or puh-KAHN?
Comments 38
Hi Ann
Think number 4 is either a star in the night sky and a reflection in someone’s eye. I never would have gotten the last one either.
Still waiting for another mystery from Hidden Springs.
Sincerely
Gail Bennett
Author
I would love to write another Hidden Springs story, so maybe I will sometime, Gail. And I like your guesses. Just reading “a star in the night sky” has me imagining a beautiful night sky with a couple enjoying the still night with an embrace. Maybe the guy does see a reflection of starlight in his sweetheart’s eyes.
Ann, you have really been stumping us with your out of focus mystery photo game. It has been fun trying to figure out what each one is. Granted when I first looked at this photo, I instantly thought a dog’s nose, but that is too obvious, and I knew you wouldn’t make it that easy for us.
My guess for this weeks photo is the center of a flower from your beautiful garden.
How do I pronounce pecan? Coming from the Catskill mountains of New York we say pe-con.
Bless you Ann, for the wonderful distraction of your mystery photo game. It has helped take my mind off of my battles with cancer (#5) this year, and what is happening in our world right now. I pray that everyone who has been playing and their families are all well and staying safe.
P.S. Linda, I too have issues with spell checker/correction. It sure gets frustrating when it picks something not even close to what you typed.
Author
I do pray you stay strong with your battle with cancer and emerge victorious, Adriann. If your number 5 means this is the fifth time for you, I can only imagine how difficult it is to face the battle so many times. I’m glad my crazy photo mystery game has been a good distraction for you.
Yes, the photos are a little out of focus. My phone has a fairly good camera but when I zoom in to crop something it’s usually a bit fuzzy. Maybe that just make the mystery a little harder, huh? But I actually try to make the mystery close-ups as focused as possible. One time I saw an ad for something that I could attach to the phone to make close ups clearer, but I didn’t follow up on it then and now I don’t know what it was! So far, all of you have been patient with my fuzziness and enjoyed guessing anyway.
Spell check can drive you crazy on a phone and it’s not a good idea to hit enter on a text until you’re sure it says what you want. I once texted a neighbor guy who was a friend and whatever spell check decided I wanted to say sounded like I was flirting with this guy young enough to be my son. Embarrassing for sure.
I pray you stay safe and strong. Were you to say PEEcan up in New York, most would send you to the south. LOL.
Photo is a canine nose.
Author
You sound really sure, Caryl. Thanks for playing my mystery photo game.
Author
When I read some more comments, I see we have some southerners who have shown up with PEEcan coming into play with Eileen and Melissa. Melissa is a true Southerner who thinks there’s only one southern way to say pecan. 🙂 And Marji bowed to pressure to adjust her pronunciation a bit when she went north. M. My daughter lives in SC and she says there PEEcan is pretty common. So now I sometimes say both but really to me it’s a puhKahn. I like how Linda had problems getting spellcheck to let the puh by. I’m guessing maybe PEEcan would work fine for spell check. LOL.
Hope, I should have made a mystery photo out of Marley’s fur. Maybe I did, and then again maybe I just took a picture of his nose. Next post will bring the reveal.
Melissa, you must be a cat person instead of a dog person since you have broken ranks with the nose guesses. 🙂 Then again, since I am a dog person, I might have decided to try to trick people by taking a picture of a cat instead. One of my early photo mystery games featured a cat’s ear that did a great job of tricking people into thinking it was something else.
Linda, glad you finally got spell check to let you say what you wanted to say. Sometimes it can be so insistent that it knows better than you how to fill in the blanks. And I do have a lot of fur babies that might sit still and let me take a picture of their noses. Maybe.
Marji, dogs’ foot pads are interesting. And Marley would let me take a picture of his. In fact, I did not long ago when he was having problems with on of his feet. I could have used that picture. We shall see on Wednesday.
Elizabeth, you are in the popular dog’s nose group. It either going to be a number of you right or a number of you wrong.
Eileen, I’m glad you’re enjoying the Mystery Photo game. I do have fun with it and it does stretch my imagination on this end in order to find a picture that might be hard to guess while being something ordinary or that everyone has seen. I do sometimes come across something in the wild that is so unusual you might not guess it ever but that really wouldn’t be fair. You are in the dog camp, and it could be a nose or a foot pad. Could be. 🙂
Author
I hope you all have as much fun playing my Mystery Photo game as I do trying to come up with those mystery photos. Not so easy sometimes. But I always enjoy your guesses, right or wrong. There is some like guesses on this one, but then there were some like guesses on the last one when everybody was wrong. I will reveal the answer to the mystery on Wednesday night and post the last mystery photo for this game. I’ve been saving one I think will be a true mystery, but then sometimes I’m wrong. Sometimes the ones I think are sure mysteries turn out to be easy for you all.
Judi, Nancy, Connie, Lauren – You all seem to agree on that dog’s nose. Could be Frankie or Marley sat still for a close up of the nose. Could be they didn’t. We’ll see if you are right with your popular guess or maybe not. The mystery will be revealed on Wednesday night with the last mystery photo for this game posted.
Emily, I like that you always see something different. Means you are blazing your own imagination path. And I have been known to take a picture of a worm.
Evelyn & Lucy – Hmm, it appears the eyes are popular in your guesses. Betsy and Lee thought so too. Different animals, but same guess of an eye. The eye of the beholder can see things differently.
Jacinda & Amy, you’re agreeing with the idea of a nose, just some other animal nose. I have known a cow to stick his nose close enough to me to take a picture when she thought I had something to feed her.
Lisa, you have a little different view. Not a nose. Not an eye but a bird breast. Could be your view might be right. Could be.
Michelle, it is peach season. And my husband does love those peaches. I might have taken a picture of one. After all, I did take a picture of a pecan. I smiled when I read that you thought saying PEE can was unappetizing. In the comments on the blog post I read about the best way to say pecan, a nurse said when somebody said PEEcan, she thought they wanted a urinal. LOL.
I love all of you telling me how you say pecan. So far not many tree Southerners have shown up. Just Lee and Betsy for a while till she moved north and followed the lead of the people around her.
It looks like the nostril of a dog’s nose.
I’m from western Maryland and I say (along with my family + extended family) puh- KAHN.
My North Carolina grandparents, had a ‘paper shell pee-can tree, in their front yard. I grew up saying pee-can. As I got older, I realized most people in Delaware said puh-Kahn. I’ve compromised….I call them puh-can ( in public 😉).
I love the Mexican Wedding Cookies….haven’t had any in a very long time. You have my mouth watering!
My guess for mystery photo #4, is, the pad of Marley’s foot.
I say pub-kahn, I think! The picture is a fur-baby’s nose for sure! Which fur-baby I’m not so sure!
Gotta love autocorrect-should be puh-kahn, this time it changed it to pug but I caught it! Grrrr!
I love a Pee-can pie. But some are a bit, too sweet. People have said, mine was the best they have ate. I like to say when I serve it, “here is some pie in your eye.” Silly I know! Whipped cream has to go on the top, by the way. I think your new photo contest is one of two things. It could very well be a nostril of a pets nose (dog or cat) or the pad on a pets foot (dog or cat). I’m probably not right, but this is fun to be guessing.
I say pee-kan. One of my sisters says pee-kahn. I tell her to remember she’s a southern girl. Pee-kan all the way. hahahahah!
I think the photo is a kitty cat nose.
Have a blessed week!