As I have said many times, my husband Fluffy is all boy. If that is true now, when boyhood is far behind him, it was certainly true when his favorite literature was "Boy's Life" magazine and his favorite activities were building spook alleys and constructing stray cat electrocutors.

Because he was all boy, it comes as no surprise that Fluffy was a fish stick and French fry kind of guy. He didn't like frou-frou girly foods like salads, and he certainly had no intention of eating them.

All of that changed when he got to elementary school and started eating school lunches. The lunches were prepared by cafeteria ladies, and as far as Fluffy was concerned, they were master chefs.

Their great culinary achievement was their secret recipe for salad dressing. It was so amazing that even kids who were all boy were enticed to eat salads, some of them for the first time.

Having tasted the Only True Salad Dressing, Fluffy informed his parents that he would be willing to eat salads at home if they could only duplicate that miraculous dressing.

When his parents asked him to describe it, he mustered up his all-boy powers of concentration and said, "It's kind of orange."

Everybody who grew up eating bottled salad dressing knows which dressing is orange, so Fluffy's parents visited the grocery store and returned with a bottle of French dressing. Young Fluffy was not amused.

They bought another brand, and then another one, and then another. Fluffy turned up his nose at all of them. Not to be outdone, his parents tried mixing different kinds of dressings, or adding spices to existing dressings, or searching cookbooks and food magazines for any French dressing recipe that might be the magic one.

But it was all to no avail. At long last, having purchased every orange salad dressing and tried every possible recipe, his parents knew they had to go to the top. They humbly approached one of the lunch ladies, and asked her for the secret recipe. The lunch lady said, "All you do is mix equal parts of ketchup and mayonnaise."

Fluffy's parents went home, made a batch of the pink salad dressing, and the rest is history. We later learned that this same secret recipe was regularly served as "fry sauce" by one of the common hamburger chains that dotted Utah. If Fluffy’s parents would have gone there for fries, they would have saved themselves a lot of work.

Fluffy is still an avid eater of salads, and has since expanded his palate so that he enjoys many types of dressing. But it still warms my heart when I serve him a salad topped with a big dollop of his secret childhood salad dressing.

Sometimes we need to remind ourselves that it's the simple things in life that give us joy. You don't always need a bottle of $5 salad dressing when a little ketchup and mayo will do the trick.