As far as spinach and artichoke dip goes, this was not a good one. Leaves of graying spinach threaded through the cheesy goo, and the artichokes had been left in chunks, so that when you bit into them, they released hot, tinny juices.

Then again, it was hot food served at an outdoor cafe patio on a windy, drizzly afternoon. My family and I had had a busy day filled with snacks but no real lunch. And, well, it was there. I slid a hot pita triangle through this dip and popped it into my mouth.

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The word just kind of slipped out, fully formed.

"This is nursty," I said.

"You mean it's nasty?" my wife asked.

No, I didn't. "It's almost nasty, but it's hitting the spot," I tried to explain.

"It's nursty."

My oldest daughter's ears pricked up, and she scooped a huge mouthful. "Omigod, you're right," she said. "It's totally nursty." As if by osmosis, we all then knew what the word meant. It was the guilty pleasure without the guilt. "Slap your mama" with a queasy edge. Nursty.

Over the next few weeks, we began to define the edge of nurstiness through our food choices. There was, for instance, the day my wife ran out for a pre-breakfast milk run and couldn't resist picking up a clamshell package of supermarket cinnamon buns — all smeary white icing and candy-sweet nut filling leaching from transfat coils of cake.

"The nurstiest," my daughter declared.

The nursty quotient in food is mood- and timing-dependent, and almost always prepared outside of the home. For instance, you rush to a 6:30 p.m. movie and make a dinner of theater nachos. Or you arrive late to a school party and the only thing left on the buffet table is macaroni salad still in its tub. Once you get over your revulsion at the sound of it ssshhhhlllaack'ing from spoon to plate and it tastes good, then you have a nursty moment to enjoy.

Yet you can cook up your own nursty. I think fondly of the time I combined leftover macaroni and cheese from a box with leftover chicken braised in red wine. I loosened the noodles with the sauce on the stove, adding in shredded bits of chicken as it burbled. It came out the orangey-brown color of a '70s Oldsmobile coupe.

Everyone was so hungry they ate it — once they stopped making fake retching noises at its appearance.

It was so close to nasty.