We are away from home a lot, at least five months a year. Multiply those 150 days by three and you get - gadzooks! - about 450 meals away from home in 2001. Some of this food is average and utilitarian (does Guinness have a record for the number of turkey sandwiches downed in a year?). Sometimes I end up with awful food (a vile penne arrabiata followed by a bus trip through the mountains was an experience so traumatic it put me off red sauce for years).

And other times - whether through good planning, generous hosts, or sheer luck - we enjoy tasty, even memorable meals. It actually requires some effort to find a bad meal in France or Italy (as a rule of thumb, though, I find that food becomes more problematic the further east you travel.... the kielbasa I once had in a Warsaw airport made the Polish sausage I ate growing up in the Midwest look like tofu burgers.

Usually, we choose the food we eat on the road. (Guilty secret: For years, I requested a bag of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups for the backstage buffets.) Other times, the food chooses us. And even though I consider myself reasonably well traveled, the dishes sometimes put before me are as unexpected and unnerving as a 2AM phone call from a stranger.

Once in Japan, we were invited to a special dinner at a restaurant where Fugu, or blowfish, was the house specialty. These blowfish are, of course, famous: if the chef makes a mistake, the fish's poisons will kill you quicker than you can say "pass the cold sake." But it was the dish before the ominous Fugu that threw me off my stride. A huge platter of dainty white morsels was set before us. I was about to pop one in my mouth when something caught my eye. The little morsels (shrimp) were still twitching, thrashing their tiny tails on the platter. Our host noted that living shrimp, obviously still fresh, were considered a very special treat. While I sat there deciding just how far my love of sashimi went, John put one of the wriggling shrimp in his mouth and swallowed. He assured us that it had no taste whatsoever. I wasn't easily convinced, and only finished my own plate of shrimp, thoroughly cooked and perfectly tasty cooked.

John, I should add, is the most culinary adventurous member of our group. He'll eat the pig's feet in Germany and cook live shrimp with chopsticks on a griddle in Japan. Whenever we get to a new city, John will head off to the narrowest dark alley to find the smallest, seediest dive he can. His nose for quality is good, though: the next day he is usually enthusing about the food at his latest discovery.

Live shrimp were nothing compared to the elaborate dinner we were once served in Norway. We joined a number a music students in a rather medieval banquet hall that could easily have accommodated a couple of kings and their entourages. The music school had a special arrangement with a nearby slaughterhouse. The evening's centerpiece was twenty-five calves' heads, each sawed in half down the middle to make fifty portions. The eyes had been gouged out by the hot pokers the cooks used to transport the heads from the fire. The luckiest half of the diners got the portion of the head with the tongue. Joan Jeanrenaud sat next to a charming older gentleman who showed her which parts of the head were the tastiest. I forget which ones they were. I had the salmon.