What Fortune Cookies and the Word “Vale” Have in Common

Last night I looked at R and said I wanted Chinese food.  He looked at me and said he did too.  Forty minutes later, it was sitting in our downstairs living room waiting to be gobbled up after the kids went to bed.  I was really excited.  The restaurant we picked had a pupu platter which was on my must have list.  We also had sesame chicken and sweet and sour pork.

Yes, my mom has me laying on a purple blanket.

I piled it onto my plate and was beyond excited by the contraband I was about to devour.  It was disgusting.  I have never tasted such chewy, overly salty with a hint of chemical flavoring food before.  How disappointing!  The only thing that ended up being worthwhile was the white rice, and it was actually very good.  I don’t know if it was just a bad restaurant or we are so removed from restaurant food, but it was a sad day.  I love Chinese food.

I didn’t completely give up on our Chinese experience though!  I still had those cute little cookies with oddly relevant messages hidden inside!  I ate two of them (Yup. TWO).  The first fortune read, “Your mind is creative, original, and smart”.  Why thank you!  The second fortune read, “You are demonstrative with your love”.  Wait a minute.  I don’t conclusively know what demonstrative means, which means my first fortune is a bust.  That means my second one is probably a bust too, which makes for three let downs in one night.  That’s fine, fortune cookies.  Who needs you anyway!  You didn’t even taste that good.

Caught snuggled up with his favorite book.

On a much healthier, refreshing sort of note, we started Latin today using the Song School Latin curriculum.  I took Latin in 7th and 8th grade and think it proved to be invaluable.  It helped a lot with vocabulary (but dropped the ball with “demonstrative”…come on!) and history.  To be frank, I have a lot of fond memories of the whole experience which makes the idea of teaching Latin very charming.  In my class, we made grape juice like Lucile Ball, pressing grapes with our feet.  We made models of Pompeii homes, and we even had a big celebration at the end of the year complete with servants, floor pillows, and lots of grapes and olives.

So anyway, we started Latin today and I wasn’t sure how well it was going to go over with the kids.  As it turns out, they LOVED it.  We learned a basic understanding of the Latin alphabet, basic pronunciation, and four new words, all by singing a few songs and reading along in a workbook.  H greeted R when he got home with a very welcoming, “Salve, Daddy!”  When we saw H and R off to gymnastics, the boys were yelling, “Vale!” to them out the window.  Sure enough, when I tucked the boys into bed, more “Vale”s were thrown my way.  Way to go, Song School Latin!  You seem to have enraptured the minds of my little ones.  I will take it!

Showing off the kid-made coffee cake by standing right in front of it.

With that said, I will close with one last comment.  Vale Chinese food.  Never again will you come near my lips, at least until next time when you have become a distant memory and I crave you once again.

P.S.  Don’t mind the completely irrelevant pictures.  Sometimes a good dose of randomness can be good.

Top Ten Things I Learned During Our First Week of School

(As opposed to the bottom 10 things I learned?  What a well thought out title, Miss. H!  Good grief.)

10.  Sometimes, the earth might shake a little.  And then a lot.  And then you will hang up the telephone (because you were on the telephone when the earth was shaking) on your friend to go running downstairs and outside.  Dumb.  Next time, we will dive under the dining room table.

9.  Experiencing an earthquake lowers your tolerance for bumps and shakes in the house.  For at least 3 days following the earthquake, my heart skipped a beat every time my wall-sharing neighbor ran down the hall.  Or walked up the stairs.  Or anything else that made a peep and shook the floor a bit.  Eeek!

8.  It is possible to have two totally unrelated natural disasters within a week of each other.  Why anyone would have to go through such a thing, I don’t know.  But a lot of you experienced it all yourself!

7.  Hurricanes are never fun, especially when they hit in the middle of the night.  The wind was blowing so hard it sounded like a huge train behind our house.  I thought for sure a tornado had sprung up nearby.

6.  Our housing development predictably loses power.  There was no doubt we were going to lose power.   If we were still in Vegas and I were a betting woman, I would now be a rich woman moving out of our neighborhood and into a nice big house that never loses power and has a backup generator just in case.

5.  When you know the power is going to go out, you can pack up your freezer and take it to your mom’s house, where she will keep it safe until the power returns.  This is especially reassuring when your mom has a backup generator.  It is even more fun when the kids are beside themselves at the idea of seeing their MiMi twice in one week!  Saaweeet!

4.  After an earthquake and a hurricane, chocolate is necessary to recover from the unavoidable stress.  This is where chocolate oatmeal cookies come into play.  Again.  If I follow this logic too much, I will only be able to look at my favorite pair of Gap jeans, but never wear them.  But right now, who cares.  Where is the chocolate?

3. In between earthquakes and hurricanes, we had very wonderful days of school!  I was not quite sure how much we would actually accomplish with a half participating 4 year old, needy 1 year old, and very hungry 7 week old.  As it turns out, a whole lot can be accomplished when one plans for ways to entertain the 1 year old.

2. The 1 year old only needs crayons, paper, lots of smiles, music, laughter, and minor direction to stay entertained while the older kids are in school.  For the most part, we are also able to find ways to include the 1 year old so that he feels very involved. This eventually leads to him wanting to go play by himself after awhile.  Another score.  The 7 week old just ate when he was hungry.  It was rather anticlimactic.

1.  Ambleside Online is a curriculum based on reading.  We love reading.  We love Ambleside Online.  If you are bored and looking for something to do or a suggestion for something to read, try poking around amblesideonline.org and I am sure you will find a great book recommendation from one of their many book lists.  More on how we integrated Ambleside Online into our school days whenever I get off my duff and make an actual home school blog.  Or maybe I could just do that here and mix it all in.  Huh.  What do you think?  Do you wanna read about all of that school stuff here?  Or should that maybe go elsewhere?

The slippery slope to granny plastic covered furniture…

Before we had kids, I had this novel approach to parenting, specifically related to differentiating between kid and adult use of items in the house.  Essentially, there would be no differentiation.  No playroom that was allowed to stay messy, no grown up room that kids could only stare at with a 10 foot buffer between them and the edge of the doorway, no plastic cups or plastic place mats for kids while adults get glasses and fabric.  None of that stuff.  If we ate from fine china, so would the kids.   I know what you are thinking.  You are thinking the same thing that Cliff Huxtable said to Theo when Theo attempted to play Cliff’s heartstrings to gain his support in skipping college.  Go ahead.  Click on it.  Watch it.  That is Mr. Huxtable talking to me.

Oh, Mr. Huxtable…where WERE you when I needed to be put on the straight and narrow?  He wasn’t here.  He didn’t tell me.  And I proceeded with my plan.  You see, after H was born, R deployed.  When he got back, we used all of the extra per-diem money to buy a dining room set.  We were going to eat at a nice dining room table as a family every night, by golly, so off we went to get one.  The table was gorgeous dark wood, expanded to seat at least 12 people comfortably, and it also had squishy chairs covered in cream fabric.

New Chair vs Old Chair. Good vs. Evil. Light vs. Dark. Singing vs. Screeching. What a difference new fabric makes!

Fast forward 6 years, and now we have a table that is gorgeous dark wood, expands to seat at least 12 people comfortably, and it also has squishy chairs covered in brown, greenish (that would be mint jelly), water stained fabric.  Doesn’t that sound just beautiful?  I know your tushy is begging to be invited over to dinner, just so that it can settle right into those chairs.

Yes, kids make messes.  Yes, I knew this going into the whole brilliant idea of letting kids be treated to the same quality of household goods as adults.  It was dumb.  No, I was dumb.  The chairs are gross.  Something must be done.  So, a few weeks ago I dropped H off at gymnastics and went to the fabric store.

Here it is, in all of it's "no child has ever come near me, and never will" glory.

After poking through, pulling out, and staring at disappointing fabric sample after another, I found a small piece of heaven.  Just a tiny glimpse of what fabulousness looks like.  I bought the rest of what the store had in stock, brought it home, and now I have a newly recovered dining room chair.   Go ahead.  Take a look.  Do you think a little kid’s rear is going to be allowed near that chair?  Oh heck no!  They will be lucky to look at it.

First Day of School! First Day of School!

Why Home Schooling Rocks, Reason #372: You can dress up as a pirate for your school day and say, "Argh!" when a math problem isn't going the way you were hoping.

Today, H officially started the first grade!  R also started his second year of medical school, and A had his official first day of “we have no idea what grade you are in, but let’s do some math and science and a bunch of other fun stuff.”

We are a homeschooling family.  I have yet to mention anything of this in our blog, mostly because I was hoping to start a whole separate blog devoted towards our school, curricula choices and reviews of those choices, schedules, lessons learned, and anything else that might prove beneficial to those interested in homeschooling or learning more about how we spend our days.  However, time waits for no man, even procrastinating stay at home moms who can’t seem to figure out which way is up some days, and on other days reupholsters a dining room chair.  And just because I didn’t make a home school blog doesn’t mean that we skip announcing the kid’s first day of school!

I learned two things today: 1.) There is a reason why public schools give kids a bit of a review at the beginning of the school year.  We attempted to jump right back into math where we left off in June, and, well, yeah.  That wasn’t the best idea.  H even told me with her eyes as wide as saucers: “But Mom, during ALL of this summer when I WASN’T doing math, I was learning other things.  They took the spot where the math things were.”  2.)  Singing hymns with my kids is pretty awesome.

Being tough. Just like a pirate. Her choice of picture pose and words.

Aside from Christmas carols, I never thought singing hymns was something we would like and I personally thought I would feel uncomfortable and out of place.  Heck no, techno!  H came over and hugged me while we sang (along with you-tube..thank you technology because if there was no one else singing we would have sounded like a bunch of howling cats), A laid his head on my lap, S continued playing with his little toys, and E was looking around taking it all in.  It was heavenly.

Holy Canoli! Yes, we are alive and kickin’!

Good golly, it has been AGES since I have written!  I can’t tell you how many times R has asked about blog updates, readers have asked when more would come, and I just never found the time or inspiration to sit down and write.  I have two major problems.  One, it takes me FOREVER to write a blog post.  I am not sure what my deal is, but I think I take way too long editing and it has just got to stop.  No more perfectionism allowed!  It is too stressful.

We were caught napping.

Two, it has been a doggone crazy year.  No really.  Crazy.  The day before my last post, S had a PB&J and went into complete anaphylaxsis.  It was actually biphasic anaphylaxsis to be exact, meaning that he had a minor reaction at first, but went into full blown anaphylaxsis (hives all over, shortness of breath, wheezing..the whole nine yards) about two hours later.  It is a whole nother story for another day, but since then we have had a huge lifestyle shift.

We ate random colorful carrots.

We were dressing up.

We have gone from eating a typical healthy American diet to eating only food that is cooked here in our kitchen with the goal of being as organic as possible in addition to completely peanut, tree nut, preservative, additive, food dye free.   And all of that cooking?  It takes a lot of time!

We went bowling.

And learning and burned bread and attempts at homemade crackers gone awry.  In short, it has kept me from you.  We started small by baking our own bread, eating way more fruits and veggies to fill in where we were cutting out other store bought carbs, and are slowly working towards more and more food self sufficiency.   I can tell you much more about that at a later date too.

On a much more joyful note, I endured (and actually enjoyed!) my 4th pregnancy and on July 8th, we welcomed baby E!  He is an amazing little boy and we all adore having him here in our family.  The kids love to help with him, S especially with diaper changes, H with getting E dressed, and A with randomly inserted serenades, to help the baby sleep of course.

We were growing this little guy.

We were caught napping again.

R’s first year of school was, well, survived.  It was was stressful with a smattering of gross and moments of fascination.  After a summer of tapping our fingers waiting for E’s big arrival, followed by a few weeks of recovery and two more weeks of squeezing in as many family day-trips as possible, R heads back to school tomorrow and is expected to come home with yet another suitcase full of textbooks.  That R is going back to school is actually a big reason why I am writing!  He went to bed earlier than he has been for months, I sat down by myself in the living room and felt a bit bored.  So here I am.  The truth is out.  Boredom drove me back into your arms.  But, whatever the reason, here I am!  I am not sure for how long, but hopefully I can redevelop the habit of writing every now and again to keep you updated with our little family.

And now I will go proofread before posting.  Let’s see how long this takes.  It is now 11:24.  I will let you know what time it is when I get back down here, happy with the post and picture formatting.  It is now 11:56 and I am going to post.  It is the picture formatting!  Ohhhh my.  I better get a handle on that!

We were posing for very good father son pictures.

Happy Birthday S!

Today is S’s first birthday!  It is so hard to believe that a whole year has passed since he arrived, but it also feels like he has always been here.  While he looks nearly identical to both H and A, he has his very own personality.  He is curious, playful, insistent yet complacent, quick to please, and the most cuddly of all my children.  He sees the big kids and wants to adventure far, but after a short period comes back for a hug before leaving to join the big kids again.  I love my S and can’t wait to see what the next year will bring!  For now, take a look at a year in the life of S.

Happy Birthday, S!

1 Samual 1:27,  I prayed for this child, and the LORD has granted me what I asked of him.

Our Beautiful Country and the Brown Signs Within

S enjoying a book after a light meal.

Rewind a little bit.  Before we found the Motel 8, before we checked many other hotels for availability, before we knew there was a hotel room shortage occurring, we saw a brown sign.  Brown highways signs always catch my attention.  During our trip to Arizona, we stopped at every brown sign we saw.  I was hoping to do the same on this trip and soon realized that it would take us an entire year just to make it through Utah.  But, we did stop at the first brown sign.  It said “Dinosaur Tracks”.  Who wouldn’t stop there?  Even if we didn’t have a 5 year old and a 3 year old, I think the brown dinosaur track sign would have won me over.

So, we left the highway and followed the signs, which took us right to the Dinosaur Discovery Sight in Saint George.  The parking lot was empty aside from one lonely car.  R pulled up to the entry doors and I read the hours of operation.  The museum wasn’t closed until 6pm and it was 5:50!  We had 10 minutes!  I went to open the door and it didn’t budge, but there was movement inside.  A woman was at the register and it looked like she was counting the day’s earnings.  I knocked on the door, sort of annoyed that she was closing early, and she came over to greet me.   A brief exchange resulted in an embarrassed me returning to the car to tell the kids that the museum was closed and a sheepish whisper to R to move the clock in the car an hour forward.

Then, I heard the woman call to me.  She smiled and said that she would be glad to let us come in quickly while she finished closing the register.  Her kind offer was quickly accepted!  R and I unpacked the kids and enjoyed the dinosaur track site for the next 10 minutes.  There was a huge slab rock that was discovered only a few years prior on a man’s private property and it was covered in fossilized dinosaur tracks.  What a find!  We could have stayed longer, but did not want to impact the attendant any further.  After placing a donation in the jar, we then headed into town to realize our hotel plight.

Fast forward past yucky pools and stale danishes, and you will now find us back in the car and bombarded by more brown signs.  We didn’t venture off the highway to see anymore, but we did stop at many scenic overlooks and I snapped many photos from the car.  Utah and western Colorado are amazing!  We will certainly be back someday to explore and it really is a shame that we only had the time to pass through.  We ended our second and most beautiful day of the drive at the Clarion Inn in Grand Junction Colorado.  The hotel had a courtyard off of our room where the kids ran through the grass, picked flowers, and even attempted to pick some fruit from the trees with the help of the on site gardener, a barefoot, long haired woman in a homemade looking skirt and a big basket on her hip.  It was just awesome.  I could have stayed here for a long time.

H picking flowers in the courtyard

Enjoying the cool Colorado River

The kids swam again, we all cuddled up, watched an evening thunderstorm pass through, and got a good nights rest.  The next day was filled with the Rocky Mountains and a lot more brown signs which were added to my list of eventual destinations.  We skipped many fun looking stops, but took the opportunity to have a potty break at a rest area near the edge of the Colorado River.  Again, we could have poked around here all day.  There were hiking trails, great picnic spots, and tons of exploring possibilities.

Yeah, someone lives here.

We did take the time to stick our toes in the freezing cold water and to toss some rocks back into the current, but then it was time to continue on our way.  We meandered up up up the mountains and then quickly down into Denver.  To our surprise, as neither of us had been here before, everything east of Denver was, well, nonexistent.  There was nothing there!  I will admit that I wouldn’t stop talking about how much I loved the quiet nothingness going on around us.

Someone lives here too. Notice my liking for water leading up to houses nestled among the mountains. Ahh...

What does this sign say? Our unsolved mystery.

After being in the flashing, beeping, siren filled city, the quiet was welcomed with open arms.  We drove and drove, with nothing to report except more grass, trains, corn, and a cow or so.

Peace and beauty found in simplicity.

Then we stopped in Goodland KS.  Never ever ever stop in Goodland Kansas.  Keep going.  The town fell short of its name and made for a very creepy crawly night.

In short, we checked into and out of a hotel within 5 minutes because of cockroaches in our room.  The next hotel we went to had a decent enough room, but cockroaches roaming about in the hallway and entryway into the hotel.  We were pretty tired and not interested in trying a 3rd hotel, so decided to take a big breath and deal with the bugs for the night.  It was gross.  I was so happy when daylight came and it was time to leave.

The rest of our drive was filled with the flat grasslands of west Kansas turned into the rolling hills of East Kansas and Missouri, briefly through Indiana and into Kentucky and over the mountains of West Virginia.  Nothing too exciting happened and we were getting anxious to be finished playing hotel roulette.  So many of our plans to stop and have fried chicken in Kansas or visit a kids museum in Missouri were quickly overlooked.  Route 64 through West Virgina was stunning as it weaved up and around the Appalachian mountains.  We met lots of really neat people along our way and it is clear that God is always at work in people’s lives.

Our nation is a beautiful country and we are all truly blessed to say that the arid deserts and sharp peaks of the Rocky Mountains to the quiet grasslands and rolling East Coast hills are our home.  Given the opportunity, another cross country trip would certainly be in order, perhaps with a bit more time to visit the brown sign locations and with a list of decent hotels for the areas through which we will be passing.

A made a hat.

We are excited to be here on the East Coast near our families and the near the history of our nation’s capitol.  We have tons of exploring to do, lots of people to meet, and we are ready to begin the next chapter!  Bring it, Maryland!  (Except the winter.  I could do without the winter.  Did someone say snow?  Maybe I will be in Florida in a few months…weeks.)

Virginia, Maryland, DC conglomerate, here we come!

In the months leading towards our cross country move, R and I had drafted several potential routes between Vegas and northern VA.  Some were direct while others attempted to visit Yellowstone and even Disney World.  In the end, we settled on a direct, but leisurely drive that took us through 11 states.   So, here it is.  The long awaited account of our cross country adventure along route 70E (and 15N, 64E, 81N and 66E, but mostly 70E).

To set the mood, we pulled out of our driveway with the speakers blasting Sheryl Crow’s “Leaving Las Vegas.”  We drove along the same road I had driven multiple times a week for the past several years, along 215W and up 15N.  I pointed out “the big ketchup bottle” (named by a 2 year old H the first time she saw it) again…, I oohed and aahed at the casinos with the kids…again..  It really was like any other day.

The ketchup bottle

And then we passed through North Las Vegas, which I had never done before.  After that, there was dirt.  Everywhere.  I have previously left and returned to Las Vegas on the other two main entry/exit highways and had the same experience.  One minute I am in the hustle and bustle of neon lights, the next I am smack in the middle of nowhere.  For some reason, though, this dirt was exciting.  This was new dirt.  We were in a new place, driving along a new road, and we weren’t going to be going back.  For some reason, that made the dirt really important to enjoy before it was gone.

It wasn’t too long before we were starting to see larger rock formations and trees.   Arizona and Utah were really lovely and there is one point where the road looks like it runs into the side of a cliff.  It was quite a trick of the eye and it reminded me of the movie Labyrinth.  Remember when Sarah is in the Labyrinth talking to the worm and the walls around her look like they go on forever in the same direction, but “things are not always what they seem in this place so you can’t take anything for granted”?  That.  That is what it looked like.

We are going to drive into the mountain! (Yes, I see the sign, but that is beside the point)

What an optical illusion! I must have been really bored by the dirt or this really is that cool.

One thing R and I didn’t do, on purpose, is make hotel reservations.  We wanted the mood of the car to dictate when and where we would stop, not the pressures of a reservation.  The philosophy worked out really well most of the time.  The first time it created a problem just so happened to be our first night on the road.  We ended up in Saint George, which isn’t very far into Utah, but there were minimal options.  That weekend, Cedar City (the next major town north on 15) was having its annual Shakespearean Festival.  All of the hotels in the surrounding area were booked solid, all the way north to Beaver where 70E begins and leads into the thick of the National Forest (i.e., no hotels).  Saint George was also packed with people from the Shakespearean Festival and a Jehovah’s Witness Conference, which as an aside was held near the Saint George Mormon Temple.  It was a riot.  Really.  It was a battle of spirituality mixed with artsy theater goers and we were stuck without a hotel.  We ended up at a somewhat skeevy Super 8 which served its purpose for the evening.  I must first point out that A was thrilled.  The hotel had the number 8 in its name, and that made it the prize choice in his book. Why the number 8?  Good question.  It is a number, and that makes it cool.

The kids swam in the meh pool and loved every minute of it.  I choked down a dry bagel in the morning with a smile on my face while the kids gobbled up cheese danishes like they were going out of style.  It is not how I envisioned our long anticipated trip, but in the kids’ eyes, it couldn’t have been more perfect.  They were beyond excited, thought the pool was amazing, that the hotel room was the greatest, and they were having the time of their life.

All three kids were asleep within the first hour of the drive. This has never happened before and it hasn't happened since. That is how tired and worn we all felt.

Catching my breath…

I am here, and I am doing more than cooking involtini. I promise! It has been nearly two months since we have moved into our new home and I feel like I am far from finding a schedule or routine.  It is overwhelming!  But we are well on our way to settling into our groove and hopefully soon I will be back into the world of blogging.  I have so many things to share with you!  Until next time….

Eggplant Involtini

As many of you know, in preparation for our move, R and I stopped buying new ingredients in hopes of eating our way through every last bit of our stocked pantry and freezer. As the number of items on our shelves slowly dwindled, our dinners became more and more creative.  There was a ton of rice and tortillas we made our way through, and now, finally, we are in our new home and recently had the pleasure of restocking our food shelves. We did have some dry goods that joined us in the car on our cross-country journey (mirin, soy sauce, olive oil) but for the most part, my pantry is fresh and chock full of yummy, new food.

I have much to say about our restocking adventures, but for now, I will share with you a wonderful Italian recipe that I adapted from Nigella Lawson and Emeril. Eggplant Involtini is a hearty Italian meal that consists of thinly sliced eggplant rolled into small, cigar sized cylinders and stuffed with, well, whatever you want! The meal itself is a good alternative to lasagna and can fool even the biggest meat eater in your home into loving a meatless dish. This was so delicious, I thought it a good choice to make a second time for our vegetarian neighbor after her recent surgery. Her son, a senior in high school, had no idea it was a meatless dish and ate it like it was a slab of steak on a plate. We all give this recipe 10 thumbs up!

Ingredients

for the sauce:

1 onion

1 clove garlic

½ tsp. dried basil

5 c. tomatoes, chopped and slightly mashed

2 tsp. sugar

pepper to taste

for the eggplant rolls:

2 medium/large sized eggplants

2-3 tbsp. olive oil

½ c. breadcrumbs

1 tsp. basil

½ c. chopped pine nuts

2 c. shredded provolone & mozzarella mixed cheese

1 clove garlic, crushed

1 egg

1 tbsp. balsamic vinegar

for the topping:

¼ c. shredded provolone & mozzarella mixed cheese

sprinkling of dried basil

Let’s Start Cooking

1. Wash eggplant. Cut top and bottom stem edges, then cut in half lengthwise.

2. With the flat cut end down on a cutting board, use a large vegetable knife and, starting on the bottom, slice eggplant thinly lengthwise. This takes time to figure out, but keep all of the shavings that you might make while you are settling into your groove. Don’t feel the need to use the end, full skin pieces unless you want.

3. Lay slices of eggplant on cookie sheets and lightly salt both sides. Let them sit for 30-45 minutes. The salt removes a lot of the water from the eggplant, reducing the runnyness of the final product. Browning may occur, but that is okay.

4. While the eggplant is relaxing, roughly chop the onion. Place chopped onion, garlic, and dried basil in a food processor and mash it all together.

5. Heat olive oil in large skillet. Brown the onion/garlic/basil mix on medium to low heat.

6. Add tomatoes and sugar, stir well, then cover and simmer on low for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

7. Remove from heat and keep covered for future use.

8. Dab water off of eggplant slices.

9. Heat a griddle to 300 F. Brush olive oil on both sides of each slice of eggplant and brown both sides on griddle. Place the cooked eggplant on a plate for later use. Here, I attempted to cook the shavings and slices together to make full slices. It worked pretty well!

10. Preheat oven to 325 F.

11. Grease a 9 x 13 pan.

12. Chop pine nuts in food processor.

13. In a new bowl, mix breadcrumbs, basil, pine nuts, cheese, and garlic. Beat the egg and balsamic vinegar in a separate bowl. Mix wet and dry ingredients.

14. On a flat surface, lay a strip of eggplant. Place a small handful, roughly 2 tbsp, on the large bottom part of the eggplant slice. Roll eggplant and place in greased pan.

15. Repeat this step for all slices of eggplant, placing the rolls next to each other in the pan. If you have extra stuffing, feel free to sprinkle it on top. If you have extra eggplant, use it to fill in eggplant gaps in your pan.

16. Pour tomato sauce on top of the eggplant rolls. Top with ¼ c. cheese and a sprinkling of basil. Bake 30 min, uncovered.

17. Remove from oven and let stand for 15 min before serving.