Alaska's Wrapped Alaska Denali Style and Spinach Smoothie

Alaska - the last frontier! This is our second recipe from the 2016 Healthy Lunchtime Challenge cookbook.  We got to meet 9 year old chef Denali Schijvens during our adventure to the White House. The day before the Kids' State Dinner itinerary began, Denali traveled all the way from the Netherlands where half of his family lives. He was in great spirits considering all the different time zones!

Jude, Denali, Colby (from Maryland) and Leya (from Tennessee) all enjoyed a swim at the Westin Georgetown hotel pool the day before the big event.

Denali was one of the kids featured on The Rachael Ray Show which was pretty cool! Here's a picture of Denali with Rachael Ray (and Jude, who was too hungry to pose, haha!)

Now, onto our social studies lesson about Alaska!  We checked out two books from our local library.  "America the Beautiful: Alaska" by Tamra B. Orr and "From Sea to Shining Sea: Alaska" by Barbara A. Sommervill.  There was so much information about Alaska that it was hard to narrow it down to a few key points, but the kids learned that Juneau is the state capitol and is located on the Alaskan panhandle.  

Since we are big National Parks fans, we explored Denali National Park for kids which got the kids excited about visiting there!  If we ever do go, we'd love to camp at Wonder Lake and wake up to the beauty of Denali, the highest peak in North America (and until recently, used to be called Mount McKinley). 

And finally, to engage all the ages of my kids, we watched a Little Einsteins - A Tall Totem Tale video that we think takes place at Sitka National Historic Park in Sitka, AK. 

The day before we prepared Denali's meal, we hiked up Pitcher Mountain and collected wild blueberries with some friends.  

The next day, we started making Denali's award-winning recipe, Wrapped Alaska Denali Style and Spinach Smoothie.  First, we make a weird face and gather all our ingredients.  The red-tipped lettuce was from my parents garden: 

First step is to make the crepes and warm the blueberries: 

Then we baked the fish (instructions said to pan fry it, but it was a rather large fish and it's easier to cut once cooked) - we used wild atlantic cod as our grocery store options were limited for halibut: 

Up next - the Spinach Smoothie!  

This was the drink featured on the Kids' State Dinner menu - here's the First Lady taking a sip of it!  

We gathered all the ingredients for the smoothie: 

And then throw them into the blender to mix up: 

And finally, assemble all ingredients together and enjoy!! 

We would have never thought to put those food combinations together and I'm glad we tried it out! It was delicious.  Thanks Denali for this scrumptious lunchtime meal.