[Show as slideshow]

One of the nice perquisites of being a food writer is that people give you stuff. Cookbooks show up all the time, as do invitations and mementos from all sorts of openings and events from restaurants all over town.

ELV estimates that he has more logo-laden corkscrews than anyone who isn’t in the booze business, and his coffee mug and apron collections used to be legendary (until he gave them all away).

We’re still waiting for some round-trip tickets to Paris (hint, hint), but until those show up, having Daniel Boulud personally bring us five pounds of his hand-made charcuterie from Bar Boulud in NYC is the next best thing.

Charcuterie, for the uninitiated, is fermented animal fat and muscle taken to its highest level. It is the wine of protein, the cheese of meat.

And merely by looking at the above pictures, you can sense the deep, tangy, sour goodness of the beef and pork by-products that are granted immortality by gaining taste status far beyond their humble origins.

There is nothing being served in Las Vegas that comes even close to these handmade products. The Daniel Boulud Brasserie in the Wynn still churns out a nice pate or two every week, but when it says sayonara in another few months, we’ll have bupkus to sustain our offal meat obsessions.

That is….unless a Bar Boulud somehow magically appears in another hotel in the coming year…

Stay tuned.