Today I reach back into time, as I don’t want to think about today, what with work being a huge headache I want to go away.

So, because a reader with vegetarian children wanted some good cookbook suggestions, I’m going to hearken back to a kinder, gentler period in my life when I did not eat animals. It lasted about six months. It ended when one day, driving past a Krystal and catching a whiff of the fatty oniony odor, I realized I couldn’t live a life where I never had another Krystal again. (See “I have no discipline whatsoever,” below.)

Unfortunately in looking over my cookbook collection I realized that my vegetarian cookbooks are sadly outdated. My favorites, The Vegetarian Epicure and The Vegetarian Epicure Book Two, by Anna Thomas, have been updated by a new edition, The New Vegetarian Epicure, with sleek photography rather than the homey hippie drawings on the older version.

I suspect that the following sentences from the 1974 version–describing a “two hours later course” you can offer guests who linger after a meal–have also been deleted:

“This two-hours later course is especially recommended if grass is smoked socially at your house. If you have passed a joint around before dinner to sharpen gustatory perceptions, you most likely will pass another one after dinner, and everyone knows what that will do–the blind munchies can strike at any time.”

On second thought, maybe you shouldn’t show this to the vegetarian kids. Try some tofu.