In the gleaming industrial kitchen at Camp Gonzalez in Calabasas, probation youths learn culinary arts supervised by guards. They chop and slice with knives attached to wires and locked to the counter.
Before taking the class, most of these teenage cooks -- who spend their days behind a concrete wall topped with barbed wire -- could not tell a ladle from a serving spoon. Few of them had ever tasted eggplant, asparagus or artichoke hearts. Now, they are accustomed to their teacher comparing whisks and spatulas to tools.
"I tell them it's like construction: If your foreman tells you to bring a hammer, you're not going to bring him a screwdriver," said Alexis Higgins, a chef from Los Angeles Mission College who has taught about 50 probationers at the camp each of the last five years.
The key to getting teenage boys from some of the toughest areas of Los Angeles County excited about haute cuisine, she said, is to divide them into small, task-oriented groups and break down recipes into steps.
Their skills were put to the test last week when about a dozen of Higgins' best-behaved students prepared a meal of bacon-wrapped dates, chili-glazed beef sate and goat cheese-stuffed mushrooms, chocolate mousse and more for some Los Angeles County supervisors and other county officials. The ingredients were donated for the annual children's commission event.
Superior Court Judge Michael Nash, presiding judge of Los Angeles County Juvenile Court, permitted the probation youths, whose names and criminal histories are confidential because of their ages, to speak about their cooking classes on the condition that their last names not be used.
Michael, a tall, serious 15-year-old from Palmdale, sliced dates in half in the camp's kitchen and stuffed them with blue cheese. He wondered if they could be eaten raw but did not try. As he worked, he told stories about the strange ingredients he had discovered during class, including little precooked fishes that could be eaten whole -- anchovies.
When Michael started culinary class months ago, he thought cooking would be easy and made a lot of big mistakes. He once burned the lunchtime rice that usually feeds 60. Probationers teased him, saying that cooking was for girls.
"Sometimes you get frustrated, but you have to not give up," Michael said, adding that he hopes to find work as a cook after he is released.
