I must admit I enjoyed the egg yolk surrounded by small dried fishes, an obvious and unsettling egg-and-sperm reference. Not so much seeing the author, drooling white sauce like a perverted Guy Fieri, next to his recipe for buttermilk biscuits and gravy sauce.

Written with the no-holds-barred ethos of his beloved series, No Reservations and Parts Unknown, the celebrity chef and culinary explorer’s first cookbook in more than ten years—a collection of recipes for the home cook.This is not an inexpensive book, and considering its purpose, it's impractically bound in off-white fabric. Attractive, but good lord, what genius thought that was a smart idea?

So there it is... hold hands, and all together now... "It's a small world after all, it's a small world after all...."Anthony Bourdain is man of many appetites. And for many years, first as a chef, later as a world-traveling chronicler of food and culture on his CNN series Parts Unknown, he has made a profession of understanding the appetites of others. These days, however, if he’s cooking, it’s for family and friends. Appetites, his first cookbook in more than ten years, boils down forty-plus years of professional cooking and globe-trotting to a tight repertoire of personal favorites--dishes that everyone should (at least in Mr. Bourdain's opinion) know how to cook. Once the supposed "bad boy" of cooking, Mr. Bourdain has, in recent years, become the father of a little girl--a role he has embraced with enthusiasm. After years of traveling more than 200 days a year, he now enjoys entertaining at home. Years of prep lists and the hyper-organization necessary for a restaurant kitchen, however, have caused him, in his words, to have "morphed into a psychotic, anally retentive, bad-tempered Ina Garten."