Book excerpt: Travel adventures and tasty food go hand in hand. Mystical Places and Marvelous Meals: A Travel Cookbook, explores ancient settlements, searches for legendary beasts, and dispels travel myths while sampling local delicacies. Visit little known funerary structures 1,900 years older than the Egyptian pyramids. Enter a chapel lined with the bones of 5,000 monks. Find out whether sex and death are mutually exclusive. Do bullfights mean blood and gore? Does roadside food have to taste like plastic? Authors Sara Nieves-Grafals and Al Getz-a husband and wife team of mental health professionals turned travel/cookbook writers-take us on over twenty years of journeys peppered with history, geography, folklore, cross-cultural psychology, foreign languages, architecture, mythology, archaeology, and gastronomy. Seventy-five recipes from their Washington, D.C. home kitchen transport us to different destinations. Sara Nieves-Grafals, a polyglot clinical psychologist from Puerto Rico, dances flamenco in her spare time. She lectures about mental health issues and has a psychotherapy practice. Al Getz, originally from New Jersey, retired as a public health analyst. He has edited scientific publications, builds cabinets, designs kitchens, and dabbles in photography, classical music and painting. Together they journey through life, traveling, learning, and cooking. Recommended for People who travel with a map in one hand and a knife and fork in the other... [to] cool locations where their whimsy takes them." -Washington Post 2/5/06: