This week’s recipe is from OneGreenPlanet.org.  If you’re not a full-fledged vegan (or vegetarian) yet, this is a great way to add roasted veggies to your diet!  Click here to see the recipe. Bon appetite!!

This week’s Meatless Monday recipe is from OneGreenPlanet.org!  Girl Scout cookies are all around us, so we thought it would be a great time to highlight a vegan recipe for samoa-like cookies!  Try them out, and let us know how you like them!  Click here to see the recipe.

Natural Kidz blog contributor, Leah Singer, is a mother, wife, freelance writer, speech/ghostwriter, and blog strategist. When her daughter is asleep, Leah can be found blogging at Leah’s Thoughts about topics such as family, motherhood, traditions, cooking, writing, photography, and literature. She’s also an avid tweeter (@leahs_thoughts) and a self-proclaimed Facebook junkie. 

Attention parents (or fellow crafters)!

Need something to do with your kids this weekend? Look no further! Sophie recently made a birdhouse.

The first step (other than being goofy), was covering a half-gallon milk container with brown construction paper. (We used Trader Joe’s bags.) This is where the moms get involved.

Then it was on to decorating the houses. Sophie decorated with stickers and pens.

Before finishing up, we added a string (or use ribbon) to the top to hang the house. And stick a few popcycle sticks from the container for the birds to perch on.

Sophie keeps looking outside for birds. She doesn’t understanding why they’re not flocking to her house. I told her we’ll have to put some peanut butter on the stick. Or cream cheese, she said. Apparently birds prefer cream cheese.

This week’s Meatless Monday recipe is from OneGreenPlanet.org! We love the chocolate/hazelnut combination, so we are so excited about these cupcakes! Try it tonight and let us know how they turn out! Click here to see the delicious recipe.

Natural Kidz blog contributor, Robin Kaplan, is a mom of two rambunctious boys, a wife, a Mompreneur, and a social media geek. When she isn’t acting as her children’s referee, tour guide, or personal chef, she attempts to run her business, the San Diego Breastfeeding Center. During those sweet quiet moments when the kids are at school, she can be found blogging, tweeting (@SanDiegoBFC), and Facebooking about parenting and breastfeeding.

A few years before I became pregnant with my first son, Ben, my husband and I attended a Jasper Johns art exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Surrounded by Johns’s Number Series (http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/4aa/4aa273.htm), we immediately began to discuss how cool it would be to create a similar series of letters and numbers for the nursery of our future child. How amazing to be able to share our love of art with our child, as well as teach him/her the letters of the alphabet. Since we weren’t in ‘baby mode’ yet, we tucked the ‘Alphabet Project’ idea away, to be brought out at a later date.

Cut to 2 years later and I am pregnant with Ben. As soon as I entered my second trimester, Jason and I began to brainstorm ideas for our Alphabet Project. Initially, Jason and I planned to create all of the art on our own. As we started to tell people about our project, more and more asked to participate as well. Our friends and family saw this as a way to be involved in the birth of our son, which we found to be so touching. Full disclosure: Jason is an artist and I worked at the San Diego Museum of Art, so we had quite a few artistic and crafty friends and family.

To provide some organization/guidance for our friends/family, Jason and I decided on some criteria:
All of the canvases had to be 8×10 (for uniformity)
The letters had to portrait format, rather than landscape
We provided the stencil for the letter
They had to send it back to us 3 weeks before Ben’s due date
Each canvas was scanned to our Kodak Gallery account for inspiration and motivation (i.e., everyone to finish on time)
One thing we didn’t do, but wish we would have, was ask everyone to attach a note for Ben to the back of the canvas

Jason and I chose our favorite letters to keep for ourselves. Jason’s ‘A’ was inspired by an illuminated manuscript class we had taken at the Getty Museum a few years before.

I happened to be taking a Craft class at the museum during those months, so I chose to create a mosaic ‘I’ in honor of my abroad experience in Italy.

As our friends and family expressed interest in the project, we let them choose their preferred letter. We had such an overwhelming response that we ended up adding the numbers 0-9 as well.

Never in our wildest dreams could we have imagined how beautiful this project would turn out. Our friends and family created masterpieces for Ben. We now not only had a gorgeous backdrop for our son’s nursery, but we also had 36 stories to share with Ben about our lives and our friends’ lives.

Alex’s ‘O’ was made with bamboo, to honor Vietnam where he met his wife, Oahn.

My brother, Nate, an avid hiker, found lichen along a trail in Oregon, dried it, and affixed it to the ‘2’.

Some of the benefits of having each letter and number on its own canvas are that they are completely mobile and can be displayed in multiples ways. Originally, we displayed the letters and numbers along the bedroom walls, right below the ceiling. When we moved Ben into a different room in the house, we decided to place the artwork all on one wall, right above his crib, which we found to look magnificent. It was our own art exhibition dedicated to our son. At 6 years old, Ben still loves his Alphabet Project and continues to ask about the artists and the stories behind the artwork. Ryan, our younger son, also has his own Alphabet wall, which he adores just as much as his older brother.

This week’s recipe is for quinoa crusted eggplant! This sounds delicious! Let us know how you like it.

Ingredients:

- 1 large eggplant
- Tomato Sauce (your choice)
- 1/2 cup dried quinoa
- 1/2 cup sunflower seeds
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper
- Cooked Rice, Brown or White (I put the rice in the rice cooker to prepare while making the rest) (optional)
- Oil for Frying (regular refined olive oil, peanut, or other high heat oil)

Slice the eggplant to 1/4 to 1/2 inch thickness. Pour the sauce in a large skillet over medium heat, add 1/4 to 1/2 jar of water, and add your eggplant to simmer. Allow the slices to simmer for 5 to 10 minutes while you move on to prepare the rest. If the sauce becomes too thick during the simmering process, just add a little more water.

You might use a food processor or blender for this step, but I found a spice grinder to be very efficient and clean. So, place the quinoa, sunflower seeds, crushed red pepper and salt in your spice grinder and give it a good whirl. If using my mini-appliance method, then you may need to do it in two or three batches. It is still very quick with no clean up though!

Pour the resultant crumbs in a shallow dish. Heat oil in a large skillet over medium high heat. The oil should be ready to sizzle, but not too hot, lest you get splattered with drops of hot oil (as I did).

Remove the eggplant slices from the sauce, and coat them in the quinoa/seed mixture (a good flip in the coating should do it). Carefully place them in the hot oil, and cook about 2 to 3 minutes per side. There are a lot of little crumbs that disperse, but don’t let that bother you!

Remove the slices with a slotted spatula and place them on a wire rack or paper towels to drain and cool for about 5 minutes. Serve with some of the tomato sauce you were simmering them in and rice or a salad, if desired.

Enjoy!

Recipe is courtesy of AlisaCooks.com.