Like all children of the South, I think my mother made the best fried chicken--in fact, I know she did. Unlike everyone else, I am being completely reasonable about this matter, though--nothing hyperbolic or exaggerated here. Generally speaking, she was simply a great cook--along with the chicken, she also made incredible vegetable soup, chili, turkey hash, and shepherd’s pie. Yet the one area of cooking at which her skills were noticeably lacking was in the sweets department--she just didn’t bake. Because of that, about the time I turned ten, I became almost solely responsible for making sure that our family had desserts.

But sometimes I let my family down, leaving them swinging from the kitchen cabinets late into the night, searching for that stray oatmeal creme pie or forgotten Snack Pack can of pudding. It was at those times when my father threatened to take over the task of whipping up cookies, pies, cobblers, and cakes, and in spite of our begging and pleading, yes, sometimes my father did the baking.

One night, we knew the threat was coming as Dad was rambling through the kitchen and then screamed at me, “There’s nothing sweet to eat in here.”

“There aren’t any ingredients to make anything decent in there,” I screamed from the living room, hoping to defend myself and thwart any of his own baking plans.

He snorted, “We’ve got Bisquick and sugar and milk and vanilla and butter—that’s gotta add up to something.”

“Is there a recipe?” I asked, thinking, again, that I could quash another of his culinary missteps by simply asking the most fundamental of questions.

Insulted, he boomed back, “A recipe? A recipe? I know how to cook, Little Girl. I don’t need a recipe.”

And on that night, what came to be known as my father’s Quarter Pounder cookies were born. They were huge (and therefore inappropriately named by virtue of an underestimation of their actual weight), weren’t very tasty (unless, of course, you consider cardboard among your favorite things on which to snack), and if they’d been out of the oven for over an hour, they mysteriously transformed into fairly effective doorstops--but they satisfied my father’s sweet tooth enough to keep him from complaining and that certainly counted for something.

On that night of his very first batch of these cookies, my father noticed that our beloved family dog, Tusk, was watching the baking process through the kitchen window. Ignoring that this is what she always did, smudging her mud-caked nose against the window whenever anyone was in the kitchen for any reason, my father said, “Look--she must smell them and she’s waiting for me to give her a cookie.” So on that very night, my father formed what he thought was a cookie-eating alliance with our dog. We expressed pity for the dog and my father responded by saying that we clearly had underdeveloped, uncultured palates, that even the dog recognized good cookies.

"She licks her own ass, Dad--maybe she likes them because they taste familiar to her," we chortled.

"Pearls before swine, my children, pearls before swine," he'd sigh.

My father baked these Quarter Pounders at least once a month for quite some time, each time giving Tusk whatever cookies weren’t eaten, and since my father was the only human eating them, there were plenty of cookies for the dog. He’d open the back door and give them to her, one at a time, and she’d curl up her lips and take the cookies between her teeth, one by one, off into the darks of the backyard. “She can only stomach one at a time,” we’d laugh.

“No, you idiots—she’s relishing their delicate flavor and, when she’s finished, she’ll be back for another.” And sure enough, within a minute or so, Tusk would be back at the kitchen window, muddy snot smearing on the pane, and my father would hand her another cookie.

We laughed and laughed that the only other living creature that would eat these cookies was the dog until one day, when we were sent to the orange trees at the edge of our backyard, we discovered the real truth, the truth that lie in a rather large mound of dirty, moldy, rock-solid Quarter Pounders that the dog was obviously hording for really, really hard times. Not even the friggin’ dog was eating them, something that gave us great delight that we, as crass teenagers, had a more discerning palate than our elitist father, as evidenced by our dog. “It’s a dog,” he then argued, “what the fuck does she know?” Ahh…how quickly he’d turned on his cookie-eating co-conspirator, but no matter what he said, he stopped baking those cookies shortly thereafter.

When I got married and became solely responsible for meal preparation, I strode confidently into the kitchen, armed with the knowledge that my mother had passed on, well-versed in the mistakes I had witnessed my father make, and completely unconscious of the effects of having grown up in a household with two smokers. Therefore it came as a total shock to me that not everyone had to buy black pepper on a weekly basis. “Hot,” The X would say as he downed another glass of water, “hot is the only thing I can taste!” I tried hard to not think of him as weak, as a complainer, as a hypochondriac; I knew that his constant gastric distress was likely caused by something he was eating outside of our home, and when he continued to do his nightly routine of pouring glass after glass of water down his gullet as if he were racing to drown the evil gremlins in his upper GI tract, I came up with a plan: white pepper. I could put it in anything, at the same volume (or more, since he couldn’t see it) without losing sight of that Epicurean goal that my mother had instilled: “It doesn’t taste good if it doesn’t kick when it’s going down.” And kick it did.

The switch to white pepper, of course, didn’t help The X’s stomach distress, but it certainly limited the amount of marital distress as he could no longer point to the pepper residue that layered the bottom of every dish from which he’d just eaten. No evidence, no case.

And in spite of the fact that that was years ago, I haven’t changed much: my palate sometimes requires me to disguise the food I prepare, making it appear to be something very much different than what it is, just so others will eat what I eat (in spite of the fact that, although they may not like it, the dish certainly looks like something that they’d find tasty).

So recently, with my son sick, I asked him what I could cook for him that would be easy on his sore throat. My not-so-world famous ziti, we agreed, would be something palatable and soft. So I spent the afternoon in the kitchen, chopping then stirring, preparing the sauce, then putting it together with the pasta and the cheeses and letting it set just long enough for the flavors to blend then baking it--and then, voila: my culinary masterpiece, and enough of it to feed us at least through the that nukular holocaust about which Dubya keeps warning us. Instead of canning it and storing it alongside the plastic sheeting and the duct tape, however, we shared the ziti with our friends.

When the forks had hit the plates for the the final time, I asked “What did you think?" I wasn't  really searching for a compliment, but instead, I was wondering how well my camouflage had worked.

“It was good,” one of them said, “but the meat--I had some questions--it looked like beef but I know you and I can’t believe you’d use beef in anything…”

I smiled, knowing I’d done it again, although not sure how much of my master-plan I was willing to reveal. “No, it certainly wasn’t beef--and, well, all I can say is that the ziti you just ate is almost something that would qualify as ‘healthy’.”