Arkansas's Asian in Arkansas

Arkansas!  The Natural State.  As we travel across the nation via our 2016 Healthy Lunchtime Challenge cookbook, we are taking on Arkansas's Asian in Arkansas recipe by Lily Radtke. We got to see Lily displaying her culinary skills after our private tour of Julia Child's kitchen at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.  Tanya Steel (Editorial Director of Clean Plates) who organized the majority of the Healthy Lunchtime Challenge, hosted this cooking demonstration with three of the kid chefs.  Lily can be seen on the far left:

Lily's recipe was also featured on the Kids' State Dinner menu!  Asian in Arkansas:

Lily's home state's news station provided a wonderful commentary about her experience, as well as her local PBS station.

We haven't been able to visit Arkansas but from the state's tourism video, we want to pack our bags and check it out now!  We picked up several books from our local library to learn more about this great state.  In "America the Beautiful: Arkansas" by G.S. Prentzas, we found out that there is a watermelon festival in Hope, AR (also the birthplace of their only president, Bill Clinton!)

Little Rock is the state capitol and the capital building looks almost exactly like the one in Washington D.C.! ("Hello USA: Arkansas" by Domenica DiPiazza).

There are a few National Parks and Forests in Arkansas.  In the book "From Sea to Shining Sea: Arkansas" by Ellen Macaulay, it describes all the amazing things located in the Hot Springs National Park, the Ozark National Forest and the Ouachita National Forest.  I love it when the National Park service provides the Junior Ranger booklets as PDFs online.  Our family is really big into the outdoors and it sounds like Arkansas is a must on our bucket list!

Now - on to the Healthy Lunchtime Challenge winner.  To prepare this recipe, Asian in Arkansas, we decided to follow in Lily's lead - this past Saturday, we rode our bikes to our local farmer's market to pick out some of the ingredients in Lily's recipe.

We found a few of those yummy, fresh ingredients such as cucumbers, carrots, tomatoes and basil under the Hillside Springs Farm tent.  This farm is located in the next town over from us.

We purchased our bounty, donned our helmets and head back home with our goodies!

Now, we get the cookbook ready, assemble all the ingredients and get to work:

First off - prep the ingredients.  The average August temperature in Arkansas is about 93 degrees with an average of 72% humidity.  Today in New Hampshire, our temperature is 85 degrees with a 65% of humidity.  So - we were pretending that we were actually in AR!  Shirts in our house were optional:

Adding the dressing to the Edamame Salad:

The kids tried and tried to fold the rice paper but didn't have much success.  :(  So, I jumped in to finish off the remaining spring rolls in time for dinner:

And the final result!  We were thinking what the best drink to have with this asian meal and thought that decaffeinated tea would match it perfectly. Thank you Lily for this very creative, delicious meal - and with minimal cooking on this very hot & humid day!