I'd like mine still beating, please.

So, as I mentioned a while back, I've been planning to post on this for some time. I was going to fold it into one of the foie gras posts, so just know that this isn't entirely out of left field.

If you didn't already know, I'm completely obsessed with food, beverage, and the acoutrements and preparation of same. I daydream about the contents of my larder and what I might make from them. Episodes of America's Test Kitchen clog the DVR. At night I dream of dancing microplane graters, ramekins, and sauciers.

And for a person like me, books and television programs devoted to the discussion, peparation, and consumption of food become the most exquisite porn.

So it is with Anthony Bourdain's show No Reservations (though it's definitely on the weird, grainy, Internet-only side of the Pornographic Scale... which I just invented). Yeah, it's a little gimmicky, and his bad boy image thing gets tiresome, but oh man. That guy will eat anything.

Tall drink of water that he is, I'm still a little peevish with him for turning me off of swordfish for the foreseeable future (yeah, read Kitchen Confidential...Or, don't, if you like your swordfish just fine), but the guy is fearless and knows good food.

In the recent episode I've watched, he is in Quebec (close to my heart, you might imagine.. what with the French-Canadian blood), and he goes to a restaurant called Au Pied Cochon, where the chef attempts to kill him through the insidious Death By Foie Gras. Literally every dish out of the kitchen to Mr. Bourdain's table was a foie creation of some kind. Oh, except for the maple-glazed pig heads with gilt snouts. The whole meal is something of a monument to fatty excess.

With the chef from Au Pied Cochon, Bourdain visits a foie gras-producing farm and they film the boning-out and portioning of ducks. The Quebecoise chef also chases live ducks around their pen.

Later in the episode, he ventures into the Arctic Circle to go seal hunting with some Inuits. While he confesses to rooting for the seal at one point, they manage to bag one and bring it home, where the family slaughters and eats it... RAW. Somehow, my confrontation with a pile of sheep's heads in Morocco becomes laughable (though at the time, I couldn't emphasize enough just how "not hungry" I was).

It was an interesting juxtaposition, the evicerated seal on a tarp on the kitchen floor in the Arctic Circle and the mountains of foie gras back in Montreal.

I recommend the show. Between being funny and weird and stuffing his face, there are some illuminating moments on various cultures' relationships with food, beverage, and the equipment for and preparation of same.

Now, who's hungry? Shall we go get a couple of cobra hearts?