Like many Southern wives, Rita Rosson recalls her first batch of biscuits as a newlywed more than 30 years ago as barely edible.

“The first biscuits I made were pretty bad but he ate them,” she said of husband, Danny. “But I knew they were bad.”

It was another recipe, however, that Rita counts as a standout disaster from her newlywed days.

“Somebody had given me a recipe for what they called ‘goulash,’” she said. “It had wieners and onions and bell peppers and you served it over mashed potatoes. I thought it was wonderful.”

Her husband apparently didn’t think it was quite as great as she did.

As he had with the biscuits, though, he graciously ate the meal his wife placed before him.

“I cooked it a lot,” Rita said. “It took him quite a while but finally he said, ‘Please, this is awful, please don’t make this anymore.’”

Reared in Lawrenceburg, Tenn., Rita moved to Alabama in 1967 and earned her teaching degree at the University of North Alabama in 1972.

“I graduated one week and got married the next,” she said.

She and Danny, whom she’d met on a blind date upon his return from Vietnam, set up housekeeping in his hometown of Rogersville.

The following autumn, Rita began teaching first grade at Clements High School in western Limestone County, a position she held until her retirement in 1997.

In 1995, the Rossons moved to Limestone County after building a house in a community edging the Elk River. They have one son, Matt, 31, who now lives in Rogersville.

When choosing a design for their home, special attention was given to the spacious kitchen as well as the sun porch, which faces the river and runs the length of the house. The sun porch features a beautiful river view and a variety of comfortable lounges and chairs while the kitchen boasts a large dining table and plenty of room for guests to socialize.

“My aunt always loved doing parties and cooking,” she said. “I spent a lot of time with her, especially in the summer.”

Through helping her aunt cook and plan parties and through afternoons spent perusing treasured early copies of Southern Living magazine, Rita developed her own love for cooking and entertaining.

“I’ve still got some of her old copies of Southern Living,” she said. “She was always buying cookbooks or clipping recipes from newspapers and magazines.”

During her career at Clements, Rita Rosson developed quite a following for her joy of serving as hostess and for her trademark desserts.

“Any time a teacher got married or had a baby, I usually planned the shower,” she said.

Shortly after she retired, she was invited back to the school to play piano for an elementary assembly.

“At the bottom of my invitation in bold, red letters was printed ‘bring new recipes,’” she said.

While she rarely creates recipes on her own, she often creates new desserts by varying old recipes.

“I like to buy mixes and doctor them up to suit my tastes,” she said. “I love to change them to suit my fancy.”

She also believes that to get the best flavor, only the very best ingredients should be used.

“I’m really picky about my desserts,” she said. “I think you ought to use quality products. For example, the vanilla flavoring should be good quality. I don’t usually buy store brands.”

As for those early biscuits, it wasn’t long before Rita got the hang of it. Like most Southern wives, she simply had to conduct a sort of trial-and-error until she found the right technique.

“My mother kept a bowl of flour on the counter,” she said. “She’d add buttermilk and just work with it to make her biscuits. I tried to do what was on the bag of flour and, of course, that didn’t work. But I eventually got it right.”