Qianjiang Evening Post

You really don't want to know what's going on here

How can we put this delicately? We can't. The fact of the matter is, in the Chinese city of Dongyang, springtime is the time to eat "virgin boy eggs" -- hard-boiled eggs marinated and simmered in urine, according to Reuters.

Virgin boy urine, to be precise. Preferably from lads under the age of 10.

Buckets of snotty little boys' urine are collected from primary schools. It takes almost an entire day to make the springtime treat, beginning with soaking and then boiling raw eggs in a pot of urine. After they are hard-boiled, the shells of the eggs are cracked and they continue to simmer in urine for hours. To many, it is the (foul) smell of spring.

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ThinkGeek.com

​Like the Salad Shooter or the electric quesadilla maker, some items that deserve to fade away -- and almost succeed in doing so -- experience a Frankenstein-like revival every Christmas shopping season. The 1998 Star Wars Cookbook is one of these things.

While we've come to accept that Star Wars and merchandising go together like Princess Leia and metal collars, there are some products that didn't need to happen, and this book is one of them. Still, it's tough not to envy the person who woke up one morning, realized that Wookie rhymes with cookie, and then got two whole books out of it: The Star Wars Cookbook: Wookie Cookies And Other Galactic Recipes and its 2000 sequel, The Star Wars Cookbook II: Darth Malt and More Galactic Recipes.

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Bakerella / Flickr

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The cake-pop juggernaut known as Bakerella made a line of adorable Muppet cake-pops, and wants to show you how to make them yourself. Curiously, there is no love for Lily, the food-insecure muppet.

We rolled our eyes a little when Bakerella revealed that Disney commissioned her to make these cake pops, because frankly, we're weary from months of pre-launch promos and dozens of Youtube mini-meta-movies about next Thursday's theatrical release of The Muppets movie.

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Cooking with Kids

​Alright, kids, put down your pencils and pick up your spatulas. A new study in the latest issue of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior found that the Cooking with Kids elementary school program is beneficial to young students. The program incorporates science, culture, geography and math into its food and nutrition educational system. And with child obesity rates at an all-time high, more schools may start considering adding food curriculum to the classroom.

Colorado State University conducted the study by interviewing 178 fourth-graders, plus teachers and food educators who took part in Cooking with Kids. As it turns out, kids enjoy making their own food and eating it too.

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J. Ritz

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Art, soccer, drama and the like are all edifying pursuits that help young people find their passions and build character. But you can't eat them for dinner. Cooking classes for kids are fun, educational, and let's face it, useful. Come summertime in Los Angeles -- and it's just around the corner, folks -- options for cooking camps are evolving and become more sophisticated, alongside our local food culture in general. Both regular adult culinary schools and programs specifically designed for youth offer various sessions for budding young kitchen talent (or not; but this is a good way to find out). It's probably better someone else with more patience and experience than yourself to teach your kid knife skills, right?

Here are seven suggestions (listed alphabetically) of where to start getting those mini chef's jackets dirty, but not with your typical playground-variety typical kid stains. Before you know it, the next generation in your household might be taking charge of family meals. (We don't mean choosing which Hungry Man meals to serve.) And then you might have one of these types on your hands.

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​Parent or not, we all know a teenager who could use a kick to get their ass into the kitchen. Teen Cuisine by Matthew Locricchio could be that book. Or not, depending on how much those kids have already spent in the kitchen during their Tween Tribune reading years. We would argue that Tween And Younger Cuisine would be a more age-appropriate title for this book as it isn't exactly Best Teen Chef winner material.

That isn't to say this is not a good cookbook. It is simply one that covers the basics. Teen Cuisine is organized classically, beginning with a chapter on breakfast dishes like granola and pancakes, followed by snacks, soups and salads, sandwiches dinner entrees and the like. There is also a chapter dedicated solely to pizza (New York vs. California vs. Chicago-style doughs), we presume because of the pizza-loving-teenager stereotype.

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Frances Lincoln

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Much attention has been paid of late to what forces most influence the diets of our nation's children. Parents? Peers? Those blasted fast food ads?

Thinking back to our childhoods (and yes we're dating ourselves), we realize that many of our ideas about food came from our favorite children's books. From Dr. Seuss we learned to avoid eggs that had gone green; thanks to A Wrinkle in Time, we were brave enough to try liverwurst and cream cheese sandwiches; and most importantly, from Eloise we learned the all important room service philosophy, "Charge it please and thank you very much."

To better understand today's crop of culinary kids, we decided to take a look at some recent food focused picture books to see what lessons America's children are gleaning from those glossy pages.

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In what is perhaps the best mashup in the history of Life with Elementary School Kids, Mike Cooper over at Electricpig.co.uk has created a playable Angry Birds birthday cake, complete with instructions and YouTube video. See above. So let your kid watch this on your computer for 150 consecutive times instead of Hamster on a Piano. And then suggest that your kid experiment with baking a cake and frosting it, instead of playing Angry Birds on your iPhone until the phone dies.

You will get your kid into the kitchen and have the opportunity to help her learn a little rudimentary baking. You will allow her to use a catapult (slingshot) in that kitchen, so put the breakable stuff away first. Will the birds (made of icing) explode like they do onscreen? Depends on how hard you throw them at the wall.

N. Galuten

Ramiro Arvizu (right) and Jaime Martin del Campo (top) begin their lesson

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Ramiro Arvizu and Jaime Martin del Campo are the chefs and owners of La Casita Mexicana, one of the best and most authentic Mexican restaurants in the city, if not the country. The two of them also appear regularly on the Spanish language television station Univision, giving cooking demonstrations and sharing their recipes. Recently, the station has been asking them what they'd be interested in for future segments, and the two got to thinking that it was a perfect opportunity to help get young children into the kitchen.

"Kids are in summer," said del Campo, "and a lot of them don't get to go on vacation. Univision asked us for ideas, so we decided to give [the kids] classes for healthy cooking." During this morning's live news broadcast, the chefs focused on incorporating ingredients that a lot of the children didn't much like, such as cactus, zucchini flower, and black beans, then using them to make nutritious tortillas.

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On Wednesday, George Laguerre took a break from packing coffee beans for his wholesale business in the charred remains of his restaurant TiGeorges' Chicken on Glendale Blvd., and traveled south to give a lesson in Haitian cooking to a group of high school students.

Erica Z. Wrightson

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