If You Give a Girl a Bowl of Queso

How one lifelong obsession became a trail, a theme park dream, and a more spacious vision of hospitality

My mother was a kindergarten teacher, and one of the books she read to her students was If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. In case you're unfamiliar with the circular plotline, the story begins with one small offering. A mouse gets a cookie, which creates another need for a glass of milk, which inspires another activity, which leads somewhere else entirely. The original moment keeps expanding until it forms a whole circular adventure.

That is almost EXACTLY how my mind works.

Except instead of giving a mouse a cookie, someone gave me a bowl of queso.

And I built a universe. One bowl becomes a world

If you give Delia Jo a bowl of queso, she will probably want to know who made it.

Then she’ll want to know the story of the restaurant.

She’ll wonder whether the queso tastes like the one she remembers from somewhere else and begin tracing bowls across cities, states and different seasons of her life.

That becomes The Queso Trail.

But if she builds a trail, people will need a passport.

If they have a passport, they’ll need destinations, regional maps and restaurant stories. They’ll need conversation prompts for the table, recipes to try at home and a theme song for the road.

Then she’ll start wondering where the trail ultimately leads.

Naturally, it leads to Queso Country.

The story keeps expanding

If you build Queso Country, it will need a grand entrance.

It will need a golden observation wheel, a lazy river with flickering healing crystals, a Southern food pavilion, and an amphitheater glowing beneath the disco-ball sun.

If it has an amphitheater, it will need music.

If it has music, it will need Disco Sol Radio and Neon Queso Nights.

If people stay all day, the park will need to open at Biscuit Hour and close at Queso Hour.

It will need food vessels shaped like cowboy hats and boots. It will need glitter lemonade and sparkling mocktails. It will need rescued animals, local artists and meaningful jobs for neurodivergent people and people rebuilding their lives.

And then I’ll start thinking about what happens to all the restaurant dishes that get broken.

Those dishes could be collected for Meltdown Mountain, where people can safely release their anger in a rage room. But once the dishes are broken, I won’t want to waste the pieces.

So we’ll need a mosaic studio.

And if we have a mosaic studio, we can practice kintsugi and turn broken objects into something visible, useful and beautiful.

Then we’ll need a place to paint discarded oyster shells from local restaurants.

And music, because some people release emotion by singing instead of smashing.

But what about people who love karaoke and don’t want to be perceived?

They’ll need private booths where they can sing from behind an avatar, allowing their voices to enter the room without requiring their bodies to become the performance.

One bowl of queso becomes a trail.

The trail becomes a park.

The park becomes a new model for hospitality, employment, creativity, accessibility, recovery and community care.

This is how the universe builds itself. My mother understood the pattern before I did

I love that this way of explaining my mind brings me back to my mother and her kindergarten classroom.

Children understand imaginative expansion naturally. They don’t immediately interrupt a new idea by asking whether it is scalable, marketable or realistic. They follow the thread.

One thing leads to another because curiosity is allowed to keep moving.

Somewhere along the way, many adults learn to stop that process. We begin requiring an idea to justify its existence before it has even had time to reveal what it might become.

For much of my life, I did that to myself.

An idea needed an editor, a business plan, a paying client or some other authority willing to call it credible. Otherwise, it remained inside my brain—alive and elaborate, but difficult to translate for anyone else.

Now I am learning to follow the cookie crumbs again.

Or, in my case, the queso drips.

The way my brain creates

My brain does not produce ideas in orderly, isolated files.

It creates webs.

Food connects to memory. Memory connects to place. Place connects to music. Music connects to emotion. Emotion connects to sensory needs. Sensory needs connect to accessibility. Accessibility connects to hospitality. Hospitality connects to employment, community care and the question underneath nearly all my work:

How can we create places where more people feel safe, useful, delighted and welcome?

Before I understood my autism and ADHD, this could look like distraction—even to me. I would begin with a restaurant and end somewhere inside an imaginary theme park, designing a sensory-friendly karaoke system and wondering whether the lemonade should shimmer.

Now I recognize that the movement outward is not a failure to focus.

It is how I find the whole story.

Translating the universe

Artificial intelligence has become an important translation tool in this process.

It does not create the worlds inside my mind. The worlds are already there, often arriving faster and more completely than I can explain them.

But conversation helps me slow the cascade down.

I can begin with a bowl of queso and trace the associations outward until they become a name, a story, a song, an image, an attraction or a plan someone else can understand.

For a person who often sees the complete universe before finding the first sentence, that has been liberating.

The imagination is mine.

The technology helps me build a bridge between what I can see and what I can share.

Let the spark keep traveling

This section of A Life Well Fed is where I’ll follow those sparks without demanding that they immediately become practical.

Some will become essays, songs, books, events or real hospitality concepts. Some may become businesses. Some will change shape completely. Others may exist simply because imagining a kinder, brighter and more accommodating world has value of its own.

Here, I’ll share the worlds while they are still becoming:

• Queso Country attractions

• Pieces of The Queso Trail

• Songs and visual stories

• Neurodivergent-friendly hospitality ideas

• Creative reuse projects

• Books, coloring pages and characters

• Healing spaces disguised as fun

• Ideas that begin as jokes and reveal something meaningful

• Glitter lemonade, naturally

I no longer want to hide an idea until I can make it flawless, profitable and believable.

I want to let you watch it travel.

Because if you give a mouse a cookie, a whole story follows.

If you give Delia Jo a bowl of queso, she may build a trail.

And if you let her follow that trail long enough, she may build a world spacious enough for all of us. <3