Do not, I repeat do not, ever reveal your secret ingredients in any recipe. I learned that the hard way.

I make an amazing pasta sauce that looks like tomato sauce, but it is not. While I've been asked for the recipe a thousand times, I only got stupid once. Apparently, the brain has very fixed ideas about food. Reveal unusual or unexpected ingredients and a dish that people gushed over, and begged you to make for years, will suddenly taste weird.

So no, you cannot have my recipes for pasta sauce, blue cheese dressing, stew, meatballs, fried gyoza, BBQ sauce, chicken in black sauce, chocolate cake, New Orleans wedding cake, poppyseed cake, or chocolate, spritz, or molasses cookies. Now that I think about it, I do something unusual to my cakes, so people can have most of my recipes, but they won't get that secret technique.

I can't help but wonder if our brain works the same way with everything.