The Reader Travels

I’m not sure what appeals to people about the gross-out factor — some sadistic, voyeuristic personality flaws, perhaps. Shows like Fear Factor, Man vs. Wild and Man v. Food have audiences peaking between fingers to watch what others will put into their mouths.

But I have to give No Reservations a pass because Anthony Bourdain is just cool. To me, his show is more about being open to adventure and finding the delicious in every corner of the world, even if it does appeal to sadists.

These kids went to Thailand and filmed their own Bourdain-style experience, but they totally wimped out when it came to partaking of the delicious. I’m assuming the liquid base is some type of rice wine, and the blood… it brings out the vampire in me.

The penalty for losing at the game of Spoons was eating a spoonful of the nastiest concoction the non-losers could come up with. It was just one more way to be cruel to the baby sister because she was the smallest and slowest, and she always lost.

I couldn’t really tell you how terrible our recipes were because I never tasted any of them, but thinking back, they probably weren’t as bad as I might have expected. Remembering it now, I feel like the combinations, pulled mostly from the shelves inside the refrigerator door, might have made a pretty nice marinade or salad dressing.

So, when I was reading Roald Dahl’s Revolting Recipes, I wasn’t completely revolted. As a matter of fact, many of the recipes sounded downright tasty even if they looked kinda gross. “Snozzcumbers” are cucumbers stuffed with tuna fish. “Fresh Mudburgers” aren’t too far off from my own homemade burgers, even if there are a few more items from the refrigerator door than I’d normally use. “Bird Pie” is a tasty pork-and-turkey pie, decorated with “birds’ feet” sticking out the top of the crust, as if the birds had dove in beak first and got stuck there, feathers and all.

Of course, now I’m being pulled like a magnet to the children’s books that inspired these recipes. I wish I’d known about Roald Dahl’s books as a child. But no worries. I’ll never be too old to taste them.

So I had another birthday yesterday, and I didn’t really care because the years are just starting to melt together at this point. But then I realized that my new age is actually the answer to life, the universe and everything, according to Douglas Adams. It’s also the atomic number of molybdenum.

Here’s to a year of enlightenment and hoping that the question to the answer is something deeper than, “What is six times seven?”