AOL Food's photo editor Rachel Been travels the world in search of deliciousness. Her most recent journey brought her to Guatemala's Chichicastenango Market.

Sea urchins, on the face of it, are not likely candidates for the title of Sexiest Seafood. Their spiny shells make them look like porcupines of the sea, and give little hint of the outrageously creamy, briny decadence that they contain. But this saffron-hued roe, whose complex, salty-sweet-sharp flavor profile is beloved by chefs, is now making diners swoon.

David Chang has been using sea urchin roe on his menu at Momofuku Ssam Bar and Ko for a long while, and now Michael White is making them the star of his menu at his new restaurant, Marea. A great article tomorrow in WSJ. magazine provides a peek at both White's droolingly anticipated new restaurant and at sea urchin, which is pictured in all of its spiny, golden glory.

Learn about the delectably slimy urchins after the jump.

This may be the cherriest piece of cherry pie we've ever laid eyes on.

The cherries are so big and bright and alive they're practically winking at us. We know food porn when we see it, and in this case we applaud Danny from Food in Mouth for going there somewhat fearlessly, transforming a slightly garish-looking slice from the Little Pie Company into this bit of in-your-face decadence. The best part is the plastic fork: Actual silverware would have implied that the pie was consumed in a delicate and restrained manner. If this photo is any indication, it certainly was not. "This," the photo seems to say, "is pie made for gobbling." Preferably on a checkered picnic blanket, crumbs flying everywhere, or standing in front of the fridge scooped into the palm of your hand when silverware just seems too far away.

[Via Food in Mouth]

This photo makes us want to skip on down to Johnny Rocket's, pop the Shirelles on the stereo and sip milkshakes two-straws-to-a-glass -- all before 10am.

But of course what looks to be a simple burger and mac combo platter with a sweet side of Moxie is actually a duck-pork patty slathered with seven-pickle relish accompanied by a gorgonzola and cheddar mac 'n cheese. We're pretty sure that's not what the Fonz was noshing on back in the day. Gotta love that fresh strawberry shake served up in a laboratory glass, too. Click over to the snapshot to learn what those lunchboxes have printed on 'em, part of the cutesy theme at Seattle's Lunchbox Laboratory.

If you're not in our Flickr pool yet it's time to jump in, start tagging photos "slashfood" and show off your skills already. And tell us if this pic makes you get a burger for lunch.

These wild blue shrimp have our tummies growling. Sara's Kitchen made them for her parent's 34th wedding anniversary. She details how she used just a little olive oil, salt, pepper and juice from a Meyer lemon for the saute. But we think it's the paring with an herb salsa verde (made from Suzanne Goin's "Sunday Suppers at Lucques" recipe) that really makes the dish pop.

Nothing comes between Padma Lakshmi and her bacon.

The "Top Chef" host's commercial for the Western Bacon Thickburger at Carl's Jr. and Hardee's is something out of a bad soft-core food porn movie. The first part of the spot is innocent enough as Lakshmi -- identified as an "author/culinary expert" -- breezily drifts through a farmer's market carrying a plastic bag filled with veggies.

It's when she hits what looks like a New York City stoop, hikes up her skirt and pulls out her fast-food feed bag that things turn nasty (and so henceforth we'll call her Ms. Lakshmi).

In voice-over, Ms. Lakshmi describes her teen adventures sneaking out to scarf down a Western Bacon before dinner as we consumers of pop culture see spicy sauce dripping all over her hand and her leg. Fear not for her pumps! Ms. Lakshmi's just keeping the sauce there for later -- finger-lickin' later.

"It's a beautiful love song to food," Ms. Lakshmi says in a press release ... if your idea of a beautiful love song to food is Warrant's "Cherry Pie."

(The Slashfoodie in us couldn't get beyond the suspension of disbelief. If Ms. Lakshmi's supposed to be in New York, where DID she get that Western Bacon? The closest Hardee's is 60 miles away in Shirley, N.Y. That's what we'd call a winning Quick Fire challenge.)

[Via Grub Street]

A few years ago, as most of the fast-food chains were working on offering healthier alternatives to their customers, Burger King made a big splash by going in the opposite direction. Rather than making smaller meals, they made larger ones; rather than cutting back on meat, salt, and lard, they packed on the fat and the flavor. At the time, I remember thinking that this might just be pure genius. After all, angry fat and carb junkies needed a place to visit, and Burger King quickly positioned itself as the go-to retailer for self-destructive food.

Since then, Burger King has been joined by a few other companies that boldly, proudly feature the worst cuisine imaginable. Chili's, for example, offers the Smokehouse Bacon Triple "the Cheese" Big Mouth Burger with Jalapeno Ranch Dressing. This one burger, with over 2,000 calories and almost 5,000 mg of sodium, contains the entire recommended daily caloric intake for the average person, combined with more than twice the recommended sodium. Similarly, Bob Evans' Stacked and Stuffed Caramel Banana Pecan Hotcakes have 1,543 calories, 77 grams of fat, and 2,259 mg of sodium in each order.

My wife, who generally avoids anything related to baking, recently showed me a hidden side of her personality. Although she doesn't like to bake, she apparently finds endless joy in the world of bizarre and/or ill-conceived confectionary. Having begun with a mild addiction to Cake Wrecks, she has progressed to ever-more-advanced levels of culinary schadenfreude. And so it is that I now find myself receiving regular e-mails ordering me to check out bizarre food sites.

In a recent e-mail, my wife sent me to a site that features one woman's experiment with risqué cupcakes. Having seen more than my fair share of poorly-executed erotic confectionary, not to mention South Carolina's famous Gaffney Butt water tower, I thought that I had grown jaded. I imagined that nothing could impress me, and that attempts at rendering the nude human form in sugar and frosting were hopeless.

I was wrong.

While I would caution that these cupcakes aren't for everyone, I think that they were very nicely rendered. If you are of an adventurous bent, I strongly advise you to wait until your boss leaves the room, then direct your browser to the Brownie Points website. Enjoy!

Okay, hardcore Stewies, this is it: the moment you've been waiting for. Martha Stewart is ready to teach you -- really teach you -- how to cook. Of course she's been doing so for a couple of decades and counting, but in this book the Martha School reaches its figurative and literal peak. Martha Stewart's Cooking School: Lessons and Recipes for the Home Cook is just exactly what the title claims: an Escoffier-style cooking tome, organized as cooking schools are and presented with flawless clarity and beauty for all cooks, regardless of experience. The only requirements for admission are interest in the subject matter and the intention to use what you learn.

As cooking school should, class commences with kitchen basics: equipment and technique. Here we learn by description, instruction and illustration the fundamental skills that every cook should bring to the kitchen. Pop quiz: name and describe the six basic vegetable cuts. Extra credit: what are two of the four specialty cuts? The answers are on pages 14 -- 15, clearly and beautifully illustrated by both technique and result. And so we go through herbs, spices, onions, garlic and citrus before arriving, as we would in a classroom, at stock and soup.

I generally try to eat wisely and well. I avoid greasy foods, turn my back on excessively processed ingredients, constantly rail against high fructose corn syrup, and try to eat all my veggies. Unfortunately, however, just as my day-to-day dietary Dr. Jekyll is upright and intelligent, I also have a culinary Mr. Hyde, who comes out when I find myself confronted with particularly delectable deep fried delicacies. Generally, this isn't much of a problem, as the fried food in my neighborhood mostly consists of unmentionable pig parts and the occasional codfish pancake. Moreover, since I've moved away from Southwest Virginia, I am no longer tempted by the Salem Fair, a horrifying assemblage of rides, petting zoos, and oil-soaked goodies that used to be the highlight of my year.

Recently, however, I came across a website for Big Tex, the Texas State Fair. While I will always maintain a warm spot for the food options at Salem, it is painfully clear that Southwest Virginia's yearly orgy of deep-fried wonders pales in comparison to the pure, unrestrained genius of Texas' chefs. With items like "Chicken Fried Bacon," "Texas Fried Jelly Belly Beans," and "Fried Pop Rocks Fundae," the Lone Star state has staked an unquestionable claim to national fryolator dominance. I was particularly impressed by "Fire and Ice," a battered, deep-fried pinapple ring that is covered in banana-flavored whipped cream that has been dipped in liquid nitrogen.

Liquid nitrogen? These guys are GODS.

Anyway, the fair is over for this year...but I'm looking ahead to next fall. Only 330 days to go!

As someone who lived in England for three years, I have encountered many a food with a shocking name.

I'm pretty sure the English are naming things "bangers and mash" and such on purpose, but there are many foods with dirty names that don't seem as self-aware.

For your pleasure and education, I present to you:

The List of Foods that Sound Dirty but Aren't

Toward the end of his life, Salvador Dali prefigured the Jeff Koons-style artistic sellout by signing thousands of pieces of blank paper, which unscrupulous publishers subsequently used to print out cheap copies of his art. As equally unscrupulous art buyers bought the prints, Dali stated "If there are people who want to sell poor quality limited reproductions of my work, and others want to pay too much money for them, they deserve each other."

With this in mind, I have to admit that I'm sad to see the end of the ultra-expensive food trend. Although I was never able to buy the $1,000 bagel or the $150 burger, I've enjoyed poking fun at the ultra-arrogant people who have produced ridiculously expensive food itemsand the insanely rich people who have shelled out cash for them. Unfortunately, with the stock market bouncing up and down like Richard Simmons on coke, it seems unlikely that anybody will be in the mood to lay down the price of a plane ticket on a saffron-stuffed burrito or a bowlful of gold-plated chicken wings.

That having been said, every trend must give a few final convulsions before it is officially dead, and the super-pricey food trend is no different. With that in mind, I hereby salute Ricardo Cardona, the head chef at Sofrito, a New York restaurant. In what is either a concerted effort to kill this trend or the biggest case of self-delusion since Madonna tried acting, he has released a $1,000 paella. For that princely sum, patrons get a huge bowl of arborio rice, saffron, extra virgin olive oil, white asparagus, piquillo peppers, black truffles, sea scallops, baby squid, baby eel, mussels, cherrystone clams, king crab legs, mini-chorizo sausages, octopus, lobster tails, prawns, and Spanish ham.

Cardona has positioned the $1,000 paella as a celebration of Spanish cuisine; presumably, this means that Spanish cuisine basically consists of throwing a whole bunch of fairly pricey ingredients into a bowl and trying to charge ten times what they are worth. For that matter, since when are Alaskan prawns, King crab legs, Maine lobster, and locally-grown shellfish distinctively Iberian? On the other hand, only the coarsest of pedants would question Cardona's dedication to his culture when Sofrito is giving 20% of the proceeds from the paella to a nonprofit group that helps Latino youngsters. After all, when one subtracts $200 from a price tag of $1,000, that leaves Sofrito with a mere $800 gross from the meal. After taking out the $100 that the restaurant probably paid for the ingredients, their profit sinks to a mere $700. How can any restaurant possibly expect to stay in business with that kind of profit margin?

In the past, I have been accused of being excessively generous towards the products that I have reviewed. This is actually a fair criticism; while I try to be very honest about the foods that I discuss, I also tend to focus on the positive and sometimes downplay the negative. Beyond that, I usually only review products that I really like, going with the idea that ignoring lesser foodstuffs is probably the best possible critique.

That having been said, I feel obliged to offer an analysis of La Cucina Italiana, a slick, beautiful monthly that touts itself as "Italy's premier food and cooking magazine." Recently, my wife, who is a huge fan of Italian cuisine, bought us a subscription, hoping that it would inspire me to expand my Tuscan table offerings. As soon as I opened the first issue, I was immediately impressed: the magazine was filled with beautiful pictures, interesting columns, and intriguing recipes. Admittedly, some of the editor in chief's remarks struck me as being self-aggrandizingly douchy, but I assumed that this was another example of the "Christopher Kimball Syndrome." This disease, named for the second-rate George Will clone who publishes Cook's Illustrated, is based in the mistaken impression that editors of low-circulation cooking magazines are actually celebrities, fit to comment on the broader world. While I disagree, I can't really fault La Cucina's Michael Wilson for his misunderstanding. After all, if food celebrity has somehow oozed into the world of food journalism, the fault probably lies in the system, not the lemmings who have gotten sucked into it.

I could forgive La Cucina Italiana its smug, superior tone if the recipes were actually any good. Unfortunately, they run the gamut from moderately passable to utterly vile. The best recipe I've tried was a basic method for roasting tomatoes. While fairly generic, it was also easy and produced a flavorful ingredient that beautifully perked up pasta. On the other hand, of the two caper dishes that I tried, one looked like dog food and tasted like the sink trap at a Korean restaurant. The other was merely bland, which made it vastly superior by comparison.

Unfortunately, we have a subscription to the magazine, which means that it will continue to occupy a proud place in our bathroom magazine rack, offering beautiful pictures of meals that border on the inedible. On the bright side, if kitchen wizardry doesn't do the trick, then high-end food porn might be handy for convincing our friends that my wife and I are serious about cooking!

When I was a kid, a Hungarian restaurant opened in my neighborhood. As this was the seventies, and my family lived in the culinary wasteland of Northern Virginia, every new eatery was an occasion for celebration. Consequently, the mood was high as my parents took my sisters and I to consume levesek, paprikas, and other delicacies. Unfortunately, my father felt obliged to give me a bite of his appetizer, which involved smooth meaty sausage-ish things. They tasted yummy, but when my father told me where they came from, my appetite evaporated.

In the years since, I've often regretted that I didn't take more time to savor the testicle dish that my father saw fit to share with me. The Hungarian joint only stayed open for a few months, and "prairie oysters" are not particularly common in American restaurants. To my knowledge, I haven't eaten any testicles since that evening, although I've long since developed both the taste and the bal...um...the intestinal fortitude necessary to try the dish.

With this in mind, I was particularly interested in the World Testicle Cooking Championship, a yearly event that is held in Belgrade, Serbia. Boasting chefs from around the world, the Championship highlights the latest discoveries and advances in testicle cooking. Recently, in fact, Australia caused quite a bit of a stir when it bragged about the culinary charms of kangaroo testicles yet failed to field a cooking team. Apparently, testicle cookery is not for the faint of heart!

Barring a sudden influx of money, I probably won't be going to the Championship any time soon, but Ljubomir Erovic, a renowned testicle chef, has recently released Cooking with Balls, an e-cookbook devoted to testicle cooking. Featuring recipes for testicle pizza, testicles [sic] pie, and barbecued testicles, the book also has some pretty hair-raising illustrations. Seriously, one video that demonstrated how to "peel" testicles made me a little light headed. That having been said, maybe I should leave the preparation to a professional. Now, if I can only find a good testicle joint...