In honor of Mother’s Day, I’d like to talk a little about guilt. Since my mother instilled in us what she called “a healthy sense of guilt,” I became a minor hedonist to balance things out a bit. So I love sex and I love food, and I feel no guilt about eating eggs from caged chickens or slices from a baby cow raised in a dark box or salmon raised on a farm or meat of any kind.

But there are a lot of people who consider these things amoral, some opting never to eat any dead animals, others even opting not to eat anything that came out of an animal, no eggs, no cheese, no milk, no butter. Some even go so far as to say that eating these things brings negative energy into your body, causing you stress and strife and peacelessness.

Some eastern religions claim that garlic and onions are bad for the soul, and to lead a happy life one must strike them from their diets. I recognize that there is a great amount of peace in people who choose this lifestyle. But I refuse to feel guilt over garlic, this most wondrous creation of the gods.

So every traveler must face foods he has never eaten before. It’s part of the adventure to experience new things. These foods may seem unpalatable at first, but then we find that if we open our minds, they actually come out tasting quite delicious. As in the case of “Green Eggs and Ham,” by Dr. Seuss. Sam displays his wares to his friend who insists he doesn’t like this green food, until he realizes he has spent an entire book saying something that just wasn’t true.

Following the same path that took me through Roald Dahl’s Revolting Recipes, I also discovered Green Eggs and Ham Cookbook by Georgeanne Brennan. Georgeanne masterfully converts the poetry of Suess into simple and tasty recipes for kids and parents.

Some of the recipes are a little bit of a stretch to connect them to the Suess stanza, like “Yot in the Pot,” which is not at all like eating Yot, and she knows it. She just twisted it around and pretended like Suess meant to say “lot” and gave a monster sausage stew recipe. But honestly, no one really wants to eat a Yot. They’re rubbery, even if you cook them for a really long time, and the flavor is a bit like seawood and skunk combined. Even the most adventurous should steer away.

Regardless, I would recommend this book to parents and children alike. It’s imaginative and colorful, and there are several recipes children can make all by themselves. For instance, there’s “Gertrude’s McFuzz-y Berries” which only require some berries, sugar, tin foil and a freezer.

Not only that, but the book itself is obviously meant to be used in the kitchen. Out of the five children’s cook books I checked out at the library, this one is the only one built on a ring binder, so you can lay it flat to reference while you cook.

Oh, and Frankie Frankeny’s photos are phenomenal. Kinda creepy, though, in that live action Grinch movie kinda way.

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?”

A gluten free diet can be surprisingly tasty, but there’s still the occasional assault on the palate. The texture of rice flour breads is not quite right, and the yeast aroma can be overwhelming. Dry pastries, crunchy bread, tasteless cookies, tooth-chipping crackers - these are all things we had to try before we found the ones that actually taste good.

My mind keeps going back to the profiteering Milo Minderbinder in Catch-22, who bought up all this Egyptian cotton and couldn’t figure out how to offload it. Finally, in desperation, he covered it in chocolate and tried serving it in the mess hall. Every time we try one of these new products, I hope and pray it doesn’t taste like chocolate covered cotton.

Then again, you probably consume more cotton than you realize, cottonseed anyway. It’s funny, I found this article in the New York Times archive from 1910, which looks to be bought and paid for by the fledgling cottonseed flour industry, hoping to do what corn has achieved in the hundred years since this was written. Sorry, cottonseed, you lost.

Oh, and if you read the fine print, you’d see that cottonseed bread isn’t very good unless you mix a little wheat flour in it. On the other hand, the South might have actually won the Civil War if they’d known they could eat bread made out of cottonseed.

And to top it all off, “It has another property that should commend it to many. It clears and tones up the complexion of humans, just as it polishes and electrifies the glossy coats of animals to which it is fed. This may serve to make the new flour very popular with the ladies.”

When the only safe options for eating out on a gluten free diet are really expensive restaurants and chains, it’s time to start eating in more often. I don’t mind, though, because I love to cook.

The biggest problem now is that I’m constantly reminded about the deficiencies of my kitchen. The house was built in the 1970s when appliances were much smaller and actually fit into the spaces built for them. The new appliances are too big for the kitchen, so it’s a puzzle to get into drawers and cabinets. You have to open the dishwasher to get into one drawer, the oven to get into another; and you can’t open the refrigerator wide enough to get into the bottom, left-hand crisper drawer. I dream of one day gutting the whole thing and starting fresh, but I have too many other home improvement projects to finish first.

It reminds me of the 2003 Norwegian movie, Kitchen Stories. I can imagine a Swedish man sitting on a high director’s chair in my pantry, observing my patterns and behaviors. The pantry door gets in my way because I can’t access the counter where I want to mash my potatoes or grind my spices. So I slam it shut, and the guy in the pantry is just sitting in the dark trying to divine the answer to a well-designed kitchen. First order of business - the pantry door comes off.

I guess since the Swedes did so much research on proper kitchen arrangement, I ought to consider buying my next kitchen at IKEA.

So, since we’re now a gluten free household, we’ve had to break down and become the type of people who shop at Whole Foods. We still resist it, only shopping there for specialty items like gluten-free andouille sausage, this non-frozen gluten-free bread we can’t seem to find anywhere else, sorghum beer and an array of snacks.

Thing is, we don’t have one of these stores in my town, so we have a few choices about where to go. At the new store in the Lakewood neighborhood of Dallas, they have more parking spaces reserved for hybrids than they do for handicapped people. The one time we went to the store at Preston and Forest, we couldn’t find anything because it was such a maze, and the staff was even snooty when we asked for help. “You walked right by it,” the woman proclaimed. Months later, my sister-in-law wanted to stop there for something, and I stayed in the car, not wanting to feel the bad energy in there ever again.

The best option open to us was the Whole Foods in Arlington, Texas. I knew the store, had even been to two cooking classes there since they were taught by my girlfriend’s brother. As I remembered it, it wasn’t that bad. But still, when we drove out there and I gave directions, I said, “It’s on the right up ahead, just follow the smug cloud.”

Just as I remembered it, it wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t set up on one of those crazy mazes where you can’t find what you need or you have to start over at the beginning if you miss something. Easy in, easy out, and good customer service. I’d like to think that if they ever put in a Whole Foods in Irving, Texas, they’ll put in one like that — nice staff, efficient layout, minimal pretension.

I must admit, it was a little depressing to read Two for the Road at the time I was reading it. We were on a short road trip of our own, staying in a little cabin on Lake Murray, a few miles north of the Red River in Oklahoma. I’d been there before with friends, and I was now sharing the place with my man and our little dog.

I remembered the great catfish and home cooking restaurants I’d been to with my friends, and I would have shared those too, except for one minor problem. The husband had just been diagnosed with Celiac disease, and he couldn’t eat any of it. Add the fact that it was Thanksgiving week, realizing that naked green beans, naked turkey and naked mashed potatoes were the only things he could eat on that normally joyous feast day, and it makes for a pretty sad vacation.

Meanwhile, I’m reading this book about all these places he wouldn’t dare eat in, reading all these recipes I’d never be able to cook for him. I’d look up from my book and smile a little sad smile at him, altering the recipes in my head, thinking, yeah, that could work.

Thank goodness for our next-door neighbors, who don’t even realize how they saved our vacation. Before we left for Oklahoma, the doorbell rang, and there was Ted Brown with a great big smoked pork loin wrapped in tin foil. He’s a wizard with the barrel smoker, and the meat was magically tender and delicious.

We made pork nachos to watch Monday Night Football, pork omelettes for breakfast, soft pork tacos with lime, onions and cilantro on corn tortillas for lunch the next day. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t have the requisite BBQ sandwiches. That meat made everything delicious. Oh, and imagine how wonderful our Sunday soup tasted with all that neighborly warmth cooked in. Food is still amazing, even without the wheat.

I’ve been on this road trip tour for one year and three months, and now I’m ready to start talking about food travels. The trip started with my maternal grandmother who always shared good food and a warm kitchen. And it’s ending with a couple who have spent their marriage on the road in search of the best in home style cooking.

Two for the Road is Jane and Michael Stern’s memoir all about their Roadfood history and experiences. With chapters like “What Would Jesus Eat?” and “The Cow on the Roof and the Living Pig,” they sum up a few decades of touring towns across the USA, eating good and bad food alike.

In the beginning of the book, I found myself comparing their travels to Steinbeck’s, as they decked out their station wagon, hoping to live in their car to save cash. Their car was no Rocinante (Steinbeck’s name for his campered pick-up truck), and they were at the beginning of their career instead of the end.

Steinbeck also traveled alone, leaving his wife at home, in hopes of seeing the real America, thinking that traveling with someone might add too many variables to the social dynamic. He wanted to observe more than he wanted to be observed. But I think the Sterns managed to see a lot of the “real” USA by being grandly conspicuous, because they not only went to eat, they wanted to dig in and taste the people, how they lived, how they talked, what they believed.

Steinbeck feared that all the different accents across the country were being melted together so everyone was starting to sound the same, but the Sterns embraced the differences. “From the ear-bending patois of Long Island to the sugarcane sweetness of north Georgia, from the honk of Chicago to the musical refinement of New Mexico’s mountain villages, the voices people use to talk about what they eat are as enchanting as the food itself.” 

As I start down this new food journey, I find myself looking for friendly recommendations. If you were thinking about books or movies where food plays an important role, what would be on your list?