Colorado's Hannah's Sweet and Savory Chicken and Peaches

Colorado - the Centennial State!  It's been a little while since our last blog entry - school started in late August and now things have started to settle down a bit.  We made Hannah Skalicky's award-winning meal from the 2016 Healthy Lunchtime Challenge a few weeks ago and loved eating it again (it was one of the few recipes featured on the Kids' State Dinner menu!).  Hannah is from Fort Collins, CO and has helped her dad sell Palisade Peaches in her town's Rotary Peach Festival.

Her dish was inspired by local ingredients which included peaches, mushrooms, cucumbers as well as using curry from a friend's mother who is from India.  Hannah received lots of press coverage as well as a YouTube video of her making this award-winning dish!  The Coloradoan, 9 News, 9 News again, The Denver Channel, The Colorado Table and our very own Uncle Mike who lives in Denver, sent us the newspaper clipping from the Denver Post about Hannah and her recipe:

My children have not been to Colorado before, but my husband and I used to live in Golden before we had kids.  We still have family who live in Denver and we hope to vacation there someday.  Uncle Mike and Uncle Willem would send us cherished children books from the Tattered Covered Bookstore every Christmas.  Our children love trains and it would be great for them to visit Tiny Town, The Durango & Silverton railroads, The Royal Gorge route, The Rio Grande Scenic Railway, and/or the Georgetown Loop Railroad.

We also love National Parks and there are about ten of them to chose from in Colorado so we have plenty of options.  In the book "From Sea to Shining Sea: Colorado" by Amy Miller, we learned that Colorado is the 8th largest state in the country - to put that into perspective: all of the New England states could fit inside Colorado comfortably!  We learned that the center North American Aerospace Defense Commend (NORAD) is located inside of Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs - the kids are very familiar with NORAD because they track Santa Clause's ride on Christmas Eve.  The Garden of the Gods are also located in Colorado Springs:

Now onto Hannah's Sweet and Savory Chicken and Peaches award-winning recipe!  The kids and I took our own course of finding the ingredients in Hannah's recipe that are local to NH.  We spent the morning at Alyson's Orchard in Walpole, NH picking apples and peaches.  Well, we tried to pick the peaches but it seems that NH didn't have a very good peach season:

It's unfortunate but glad we were still able to enjoy some sort-of local peaches!  Some of the apples were ready to be picked - Hannah suggested Gala apples:

But those didn't look so ready… we decided upon Golden Ginger apples which were delicious!  We had a great morning picking apples and playing around the orchard:

Once nice thing was that Alyson's Orchard also sold local honey.  I bought a jar of this yumminess!

When we got home, we decided to have some friends over and start cooking!  First, we assembled our ingredients:

And got to prepping:

And sauce making goodness:

We were having such a great time with our friends that I forgot to capture it all on camera - I think this is the only picture I was able to get with most of the kids - we started off our meal with some Newman's Own peach salsa:

And here is the final, delicious meal.  We made a peach smoothie to go along with this meal.  We made a "peach party" out of Hannah's recipe.

At the end, we enjoyed an apple pie from all of the apples we picked!

Thank you Hannah for your creative and yummy meal that we were able to re-create!  We had fun at apple picking and peach eating at our impromptu peach party!

California's Cannon's California Rolls

California!  The Golden State.  The very adorable, eight year old Cannon Meiers won the 2016 Healthy Lunchtime Challenge for his home state.  He was one of the few kid chefs who was featured in the White House's video about the event.  Cannon has been featured in his home state's several newspaper articles and TV news broadcasts.

And, after the trip to the White House - it was so cool to see that he was part of the Sonoma County Fair and paired with California's celebrity chef Laurie Figone to make his award winning "Cannon's California Rolls"

Cannon's demonstration at the fair was sponsored by La Tortilla Factory - it looks like he had an amazing experience participating at the fair!

Part of our journey trying out each new recipe from the 2016 Healthy Lunchtime Challenge, we are learning about the state the recipe came from.  We learned about the year-round mild climate which helps California's growing season for many varieties of produce.

We experienced this comfortable weather in southern California when we lived in Arizona.  We took annual trips to visit the Pacific Ocean and our family who lives near Los Angles.  At Campland in San Diego, Jude learned to ride a bike without training wheels, he met Spiderman on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,

experienced Jedi Training at Disneyland during the holidays,

and we all watched the sunset at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley National Park:

California is a HUGE state and there is so much more to learn about it than a from a few visits.  So, we went to our library and found a few books about this great state and picked up some Pepperidge Farm Sausalito cookies on our way home to learn more about it.  

In "America The Beautiful: California" by Tamra B. Orr, we learned that the state capitol is Sacramento and how the "Great California Gold Rush" helped this territory to become a state. In "Letters from Home: Yosemite" by Lisa Halvorsen, we learned more about this wondrous national park, its inhabitants and touristy landmarks.  In "A Child's California" by Dan Harder, we looked at pictures of different plants, animals, cultures and attractions.  And in "Little California" block book, my two youngest read about the fun beaches, mountains and cable cars that can be found there.  

Now, onto the main event of making Cannon's California Rolls!  First, we assemble the ingredients: 

And we get to work! 

And then we plated it, set the picnic table outside and enjoyed this yummy meal!  In fact, the kids didn't even wait for me to take a picture before starting to dig in and eat.  And we added grapes on the side, just like Cannon suggested. 

Thanks Cannon!  We are so glad we tried your delicious recipe and we hope to make it again soon.  Keep up with your culinary creations and healthy eating - we look forward to seeing what you come up with next!  

A Garden Party

We are very grateful to have such dedicated organizations in our community who spend their time & talents on helping others.  Every Tuesday, the Community Garden Connections through Antioch University New England, organizes & invites everyone to a "Garden Party" at the Westmoreland Garden Project (which is part of the Kitchen Gardeners International - they had a part is starting the White House Kitchen Garden!)

We took the Community Garden Connections group up on their offer and joined in the garden party fun!  One of the leaders, Ben, gave us a tour of the grounds and showed us the ropes.  We then donned our gloves and got to work:

We helped harvest carrots:

Onions:

Jude pulled up the biggest one:

Cabbage & peppers:

We had a fun time at this Garden Party and plan on joining in next time!

More importantly, we were able to make some connections in order to start our own two community gardens.  The boys start school next week (!) and we hope to push our proposal to start a greenhouse on their elementary school grounds.  Stay tuned!

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!