Those of you who know me, know I’m a big NPR fan and get most of my news from NPR and by listening to out local NPR affiliate, KNPR. Hot Wife enjoys NPR but not to the nearly excessive amount that I do. Recently, KNPR was having one of their pledge drives. I waited a few days for payday and “renewed our membership.” For my $100 donation, we got a $25 gift certificate to one of our favorite restaurants, Hash House a Go Go. Luckily, we didn’t get any tote bags or coffee mugs.

Anyway, on Monday night when I was in Mesquite doing fish surveys, I got an excited call from Hot Wife: “I just got home and checked the answering machine and there was a message from KNPR saying we won the sweepstakes grand prize and to call them back. Do you know what the grand prize is?”

I replied that I think it was a $500 gift certificate to some restaurant. Yesterday, I swung by the KNPR office to pick up the prize. Sure enough, it is a $500 gift certificate to one of the gourmet restaurants at the MGM Grand.

Now, a gift certificate for the Apple Store or REI, I could immediately apply to my internal wish list (for the family, of course). For food, it’s not so easy. So now we have some choices to make. Although we clean up pretty good when go to the Big City (hyuk, hyuk), one of the restaurants, Joel Robuchon probably exceeds the limits of our palate and would also exceed the limits of the gift certificate. Also, I don’t know how to physically prepare my body for a 16 course meal.

In any case, Hot Wife is analyzing the chefs, menus, and our tastes and likes. She doesn’t like sushi, so Shibuya is probably out.

I see this as an opportunity for some long awaited food experimentation. I’ve never had Kobe beef (from cows fed beer, saki, and given daily massages), truffles (ectomycorrhizal fungi hunted with pigs or dogs!), saffron (flower stigmas harvested by hand from a sterile triploid mutant plant completely dependent on its human masters), caviar (fish eggs from really cool fish that are going extinct), foie gras (liver from force fed geese), bird nest soup (the saliva of the edible-nest swiftlet), or any other number of strange and expensive foods.

Roll over Veblen, conspicuous consumption, here we come!