How this blog started…

The start of this blog was inspired by my son's recent trip to the White House.  Earlier this year, I found a flyer from Symonds Elementary School, where my boys attend in Keene, NH.  The flyer advertised a national recipe contest using fresh, healthy, local ingredients.  Well, that was easy for us!  I grew up with a garden in our backyard (and we are in the process of creating our own garden at our new home here in Keene, NH. We purchased our home in August 2015 so we've been here almost a year and love being back in the Granite State!).  Growing up, the one veggie that was quite versatile was zucchini.  So I suggested to Jude that we create something around zucchini.  After a day or so of brainstorming different concepts, the birth of his Teeny Zucchini Triangular Panini was born!

It's basically a zucchini pancake stuffed into a half pita bread, and cut into triangles for easy dipping in marinara sauce.  You can find the recipe here  Teeny Zucchini Triangular Panini  It was quite amazing that Jude won - we were astounded when we received the email from the Healthy Lunchtime Challenge team.

Then Jude became famous… well, kind of.  Our local newspaper ran an article about it - written by a great family friend, Shawn Cyr.  Jude made the front page, which you can read about here:  Panini Power.  NH's WMUR News had a blurb about him on the evening news and he was featured on their Cook's Corner.

And yes, his recipe was featured on the Kids State Dinner menu that day at the White House.  Jude was a little discouraged that the White House chefs did not add the marinara dipping sauce, haha!  Another big thing was that he got to sit right next to celebrity chef, Rachael Ray!  During the dinner he challenged her to a thumb war…

So, it certainly was a day that will go down in our family's history.  What's so cool about this adventure is that a lot of our friends are preparing Jude's recipe for their families.  When the kids and I would stay at my parents house in Milford, NH for the summers (to escape the Tucson heat when we lived in AZ) and all that zucchini was making its generous way into the world, we would donate the extra veggies to Manchester NH's soup kitchen.  Now that we live here in Keene, we plan to do the same.

Mrs. Michelle Obama mentioned Jude's name twice during her speech at the Kids' State Dinner.  Mrs. Obama has called upon all of the Healthy Lunchtime Challenge winners as ambassadors of healthy change.  Jude plans on taking this ambassador position head on and has already visited The Community Kitchen here in Keene to see how he can help out.  Here are some pictures from our visit:

We learned that a lot of our local neighborhood children are not able to eat healthy because produce can be expensive.  Jude has some great ideas on how he can help others eat healthy - and we narrowed them down into manageable projects.

1. First, we plan to add a separate vegetable garden to grow in the front of our house.  It will be for the sole purpose of donating the vegetables to The Community Kitchen.  They have "gleaners" who will come to our home and harvest the produce to bring back to their soup kitchen.

2. Second, and a little more daunting, is to add a greenhouse to the Symonds Elementary School community garden.  Because the school is not staffed over the summer months, we thought of adding a greenhouse so fresh, local produce can be grown and donated year round. A lot more in-depth learning about plant life cycles and good citizenship could be added to the curriculum (wishful thinking, I know…) So - we drafted up a proposal and will be delivering it to the school board and principal very soon.  Finger's crossed!

3. And our third project - a little more personal - is for our family to cook up every winning recipe from the 2016 Healthy Lunchtime Challenge Cookbook throughout the 2016-2017 academic school year.  It's a great way for our family to follow the Choose MyPlate Guidelines as well as learning about every state in our fantastic country.  It's a great lesson in geography! We plan on going in alphabetical order, so first on our list will be Alabama.

Through this blog, we hope to keep you updated on all three of these projects.  We were inspired by the White House Kids' State Dinner event and will continue to try new recipes and learn how we can help others make healthy choices too.

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to our family blog!  We have always had a passion for eating healthy and living a healthy lifestyle.  One of our kitchen cabinets is filled to the brim with cookbooks for all occasions and each one of the three kids has their own.  Venturing into the kitchen and creating different foods is what we like to do.  We also have a love of the outdoors and will often see us hiking, camping and/or doing something recreational outside.  Thanks for checking out our site!