ON HALLOWEEN, I made a New Year's resolution to improve my culinary expertise, and already I feel the growing confidence that comes with knowing how to get ketchup out of the bottle and to open a bottle of plonk without using a corkscrew.

Admittedly, applying butter without leaving the bread looking like it got run over by a lawnmower still leaves me baffled, how to open the pork and beans without a can opener remains a puzzle, and I've yet to find out why Brazil nuts rise to the top of the muesli packet.

Just as Rome wasn't built in a day, the No. 9 bus is slower on Sundays and the income tax generally gets paid late, gaining the wisdom of kitchenry isn't accomplished overnight. It's more like laboring for an advanced degree in Riemannian geometry with the lights off.

Now I've long since considered myself a reasonably adept hand in the kitchen, able to get milk onto the cereal, the grapefruit juice out of the plastic container and so forth, without making a total shambles of the whole business.

In fact, there are a number of dining specialties upon which I pride myself, but my wife Elizabeth's view, delivered with a bit of a curled lip, is that knowing how to make applesauce and when to throw out the zucchini without once having to taste the stuff do not a cordon bleu chef make.

Still, I really don't care all that much for applesauce, and on the occasions when Elizabeth swans off to Canada to visit her brother for weeks at a time, I do find a steady diet of grits and canned salmon and creamed chipped beef on toast, served on alternate days, rather on the boring side.

I've always found Halloween to be an ideal time for pondering one's existence and taking stock of one's life, and it was on the latest such occasion that I found myself beginning to hate grits and chipped beef, and resolved to do something about it, by honing my culinary skills.

It is, as I've quickly learned, easier to ponder than to perform. I needed guidance, and the obvious source would, under normal circumstances, be one's wife - particularly one like Elizabeth, who can whip up a five-star meal just by turning on the oven thingie.

These, alas, are not normal circumstances. One of the keystones that have held Elizabeth and me happily together through 14 years of marriage, 11 cats, six changes of cars and acutely opposite tastes in lamp shades is the rule that we never occupy the kitchen at the same time.

I decided that the best way to start was to learn the tools of the trade - what things work when and why - and embarked on a course of what might best be described as "reading up:" cookbooks, recipes, hints in newspaper articles or just plain and usually bad advice from friends.

Okay, so it's been nearly a month and I still haven't mastered Caesar salad or pheasant under glass or baked Alaska. But I do know what makes ketchup stick in the bottle and how to, well, unstick it.

One scientific chap explained that tomato ketchup is what his lot call "thixotropic" - that is, sometimes it acts like a solid, at other times like a liquid. Open a new bottle, and what have you got - a solid, tenaciously defying gravity as you shake it over your steak and french fries.

Now put the cap back on and shake the bejesus out of the bottle, open it again, turn it upside down, and presto! A liquid, pouring like water, inundating your steak, the plate, one-third of the tablecloth, the chair, your shoes and the cat. Amazing what a little knowledge can accomplish.

If you're too cheap to go out and buy a good non-stick frying pan and you find that when you use an iron skillet fried eggs tend to stick to the pan like superglue, here's a hint. Beforehand, sprinkle the bottom of the frying pan with salt and heat at high temperature for a minute or three.

What you get is an instant non-stick frying pan, good for one non-stick pan-fry. Of course, the problem is that it's good for only one go and each time you have to do the salt business all over again before cooking. But what the hell - six pounds of salt is still cheaper than a non-stick frying pan.

We're on a roll here. If you're boiling vegetables for dinner and you're in a hurry, add salt to the water. It seems that salty water has a boiling point above that of fresh - and the hotter the water, the quicker the veggies will cook.

(The fact is that excess salt has been strongly linked to coronary heart disease and speeding up those boiled potatoes, cauliflower and brussels sprouts may give you a heart attack before dessert, but hey, life is full of little games of chance.)

I've also learned that if we were all a bit taller, like by about nine inches or so, it would minimize the chances that toast falling off a plate would land, as it always seems to do, with the butter-side down, on all the cat hair. But you'd need a degree in physics and advanced aerodynamics to follow this one, so I won't bother.

Anyway, my cookery knowledge is advancing by leaps and bounds, albeit with mixed results so far. I produced a lovely vichyssoise, and very tasty it was- all six gallons of it. I must spend some time on the measurements section of "The Joy of Cooking."

I also turned out some nifty cornmeal dumplings, the lone drawback being that they had a consistency approximating that of a Jack Nicklaus five-star golf ball. Something about overcooking.

But progress is progress, and such is mine that I feel confident that I can have guests around for dinner sometime soon. Perhaps your goodselves? And maybe you could tell me - just why do Brazil nuts rise to the top of the muesli packet?

Thought for the Week: If you're not the lead dog, the scenery never changes.

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