Here's Andrew Zimmern Cooking with Poppy Tooker

Travel guy, chef and do-gooder Andrew Zimmern was in New Orleans way back in January to make shrimp étouffée with WWNO radio host Poppy Tooker and raise money for Market Umbrella. (He also stopped by Haydel's bakery for king cake, considering that this was during Carnival.) This was part of his MSN webseries Appetite for Life, in which he's been going around doing fundraise-y events across the South and showing off the high points of different cities' and towns' culture. The New Orleans episode is now available online.

Why'd he come to New Orleans? "The food, the food, the people, the music, and the food." He also gives some advice to visitors to the city: "So many tourists come from all over the world to New Orleans, and I'm always telling 'em, you learn more in a local market than you do in a museum." He gets some sausage from Cochon Butcher for grilling, and gets coached up on making étouffée by Poppy Tooker. And that sausage? Yeah, it leads to a penis joke, as it always should.

Video: Smothered in Tradition

Also check out his visit to Haydel's, where he discovers that the king cake baby kinda looks like him.

· Appetite for Life: Smothered in Tradition [MSN]