Cooking Up China

At school Laina takes a cooking class and the session they are currently in is called cooking around the world. The teacher picks a different part of the world each week, teaches the kids about it and they cook one dish from that country. They generally have a sample to take home and share with their family at dinner time. It's a great class and Laina loves it so much. We have sampled pizza and tomato & mozzarella salad from Italy, desserts from Australia and other fun goodies.

I thought it would be a neat idea to try this at home with something I've been wanting to make here for a while anyway - egg rolls! So I found a great web site and printed off lots of fun, kid friendly activities about China. We learned lots of great things about the Chinese New Year and the zodiac. Laina loved learning who was the year of the rat, pig, bunny, etc. She asked me every possible persons birth year and charted out who was what animal and then figured out which animal had the most. We really had a great time.

Then it was on to cooking egg rolls. Laina helped me cook the filling and then scoop it into the egg roll wrappers and roll the egg rolls. We decided to bake the egg rolls to make them a little bit healthier for us. They came out really good. Not quite as good as a good old fried egg roll but...we still enjoyed them. Well Joe and I enjoyed them. Laina did not care for them. But she sure did have fun making them!