WHEN IT COMES to things culinary, I've always yearned to cultivate a bit of expertise, tossing salads hither and yon, marinating the occasional cow and baking Alaska and maybe a corner of Tennessee that looks tasty. And I will concede that serving up cat food as fish pate was probably not my finest contribution to the art.

As a hobby, there's no beating cookery for pure class and character, a world of wondrous aromas and tastes to make its practitioner the object of much envy and admiration - the sort of thing you never get stuffing olives or catching bugs with your teeth or swatting flies on elephants.

Trouble is, I was never very good at it. It's a genetic thing, going all the way back to my father. Dear old Dad was a grand man, but he was to cookery what geese are to jet engines, a mess begging with open arms for a chance to be created.

Example: He once whomped up a gallon or so of pinto beans, shoved them in a pressure cooker and stepped back just in time to avoid the geyser that shot through the safety valve and deposited a perfect circle of liquefied beans on the kitchen ceiling (which my mother had just painted fire engine red - she had her own set of problems).

Dad had a peculiar talent with leftovers, turning them into things that would make plots for Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King novels. I still break out into nighttime sweats over recollections of his version of chicken a la king which looked like the title character in the movie "Donovan's Brain."

And there's no sense getting into the money-saving project that involved 1,000 baby chicks and months of chicken feed and chicken doo-doo that produced one chicken dinner at an estimated cost of $175.94 and 23 clucking stragglers that somehow had become backyard pets.

These things can serve to thwart an impressionable kid's psyche, or something. Whatever, my dad's cavalier dashes into the land of cuisine spurred me to try my own, equally deftless hand. My initial effort resulted in a single pancake three inches thick, followed quickly by eggnog and a bout with salmonella poisoning.

Still, it seemed jolly good fun, and it was this sense of adventure coupled with a yen to try something really different that led to the highlight, or lowlight, of my culinary career. A sense of revenge admittedly may have played a part, since I had been ordered to go out and buy some pate for a bunch of party guests who wouldn't know pate from pickled duckbill platypus.

Anyway, in this particular locale there was no pate to be had, but the A&P did shelve a variety of cat food that looked, and even smelled, like fish pate. I loaded up with cans of the stuff, trotted it back to the kitchen, sliced it up and served it to one and all with Ritz crackers on a very attractive cheeseboard.

Eventually the truth outed. My opinion, delivered even as I headed out the door in the general direction of Vietnam, half a world away, was that this assembly of stuffed shirts had cheerfully scarfed the lot inside 20 minutes and suffered no ill effects, nor even from the 3 percent ash that the label said the cat food contained.

Besides which, who was going to tell them?

Nevertheless, I had been well and truly bitten by the culinary bug. Unfortunately, this was unaccompanied by any talent for cooking up much of anything except other food-oriented bugs of the type that produce ptomaine and salmonella and Technicolor smiles and the green apple quickstep.

That was in my single days. I've now been married for a number of years, and I spend a lot less time commode-hugging after bouts of culinary experimentation. My wife insists that letting things in bowls and cans grow beards like so many chilled cave hermits is not conducive to a healthy diet and ordered that I cease and desist. (Alexander Fleming or someone discovered penicillin on moldy bread, I remind her. Then I duck.)

Elizabeth also is a stickler for heeding those annoying "sell-by" dates that they stamp on all sorts of food these days. Ridiculous, says I - does that means that peaches in a can marked "sell-by Dec 9" are peachy dandy until midnight, then suddenly become botulism bullets for an upcoming germ-driven Armageddon?

Yes, says she, and out they go. Another battle with feminine logic lost.

I remain undeterred. I am getting better at the stove, I think, and in fact have developed a whole range of largely untainted edibles, including fried Spam sandwiches, grits and canned salmon, corned beef hash aux chevalles (corned beef hash with fried eggs on top) and creamed chipped beef on toast, or SOS (get a military vet in your family to explain that one to you).

In honor of my heritage, I have proudly labeled my interpretation of this particular cuisine as "American exotic." (My wife, ever the Englishwoman, has labeled it "ptomaine-in-waiting." Eaten alive by cynicism, she is.)

Meanwhile, I have just come into possession of a treasure trove of vanilla wafers, items that are as rare as cold beer and a decent hot dog in Britain. So upcoming shortly - next week, in fact - is my own version of that ever-popular Southern dish, banana pudding.

With the assistance of a number of old friends and acquaintances on the Internet, I have a whole raft of recipes for the stuff, and I'll doubtless add my own unique twist to the final product.

But I am going to skip the proffered versions that appear to include jalapeno peppers and Hungarian paprika. Nor will I wash it down with beer, as I used to do with banana splits - a concoction that once got me thrown out of the dining room at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem.

And the cat food pate's off. Well, at least for today.

Thought for the Week: Read books that will make you look good if you die in the middle of them.

"Notes From A Tangled Webb" is syndicated by: