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Cooking Inspiration + Life Lately

 

Veggies for Roasting
I have been obsessed with roasting veggies lately. Here’s a little something that I dreamed up: Roasted Vegetable Chicken Alfredo. I baked up a pan of broccoli, grape tomatoes and garlic (drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt) and added it to a basic Alfredo sauce. It was awesome.
By the way, lining your pan with parchment paper is the best. No dangerous aluminum and no nasty cleanup.
Roasted Tomatoes
I also roasted up a pan of heirloom tomatoes that I got from the co-op. I pureed them with some cream and used it as a sauce for pasta. Reuben really like it, even though it didn’t have any meat! Here’s what the finished product looked like.
I usually roast my vegetables between 400 and 450 degrees F for about half and hour, or until they look done to me.
Infused Water
You guys. Infused water is so refreshing. I experimented with a blend of lemon, cucumber and mint. Reuben calls it pickle water (he doesn’t care for cucumbers), but I like it.
Figs
I tried figs for the first time! It’s quite a different flavor, but I enjoyed it. We sauted them with butter and honey and served them over vanilla ice cream. Delicious.

 

Vintage Silver
I LOVE the vintage silverware I got from Reuben’s grandma. Some of the pieces are very odd. I’ll have to do a bit of research to learn the intended uses for them.
Shiny Red Kitchen Aid!
I finally purchased a Kitchen Aid stand mixer! I found it for almost half-price on Gilt (BTW, if you use my link you’ll get $25 off your first order and I’ll get $25 off my next order!). I have waited for over two years for this. Now I can make bread without hand-kneading it!

 

Helen
And of course I have to throw in a Helen update. This little rascal started crawling last month (at 6 months old) and is starting to pull herself up onto things everything (almost 7 months old). She keeps me on my toes – she’s already an expert at Getting Into Things. And she’s VERY interested in my food photography.
If you’d like to read more about Helen and see pictures from my everyday life, check out my personal blog and my Instagram.
Also, let me know in the comments if you like these inspiration/life update posts, or if you’d prefer that I keep it to recipe posts.
Have a lovely day!
Erica

Anonymous

Monday 16th of September 2013

Erica, if you can take a photo of the silverware laid out, I can probably tell you what most of them are. I see fish forks and knives and the ribbed spoon is for serving molded aspics and jellies. The shorter knives are butter knives.

I have my grandmother's silver and much of it is similar.

Now, grab a jar of silver polish, girl! I hate polishing mine, but it looks so lovely when it's polished up.

Diane

nbay4

Monday 16th of September 2013

Yep, keep the updates coming along with the recipes as I find them both inspirational! Your blog is a breath of fresh hair in my very hectic life.

Sarah | The Sugar Hit

Monday 16th of September 2013

What a gorgeous little angel. Adorable! And yeah, we love update posts!

Rosebud

Thursday 12th of September 2013

I rarely ever comment to my emails but I just have to say your little angel is so precious and pretty. Know it can get very frustrating sometimes but they grow so fast and soon they're out of your life. Relish every impish thing she does. And keep on taking pictures of her all along the way. You'll be so glad you did. I lost a whole lot of years worth of pictures because (1) my pc crashed plus (2) when we went to retrieve all the pictures I'd saved on the disks someone told me to use, it turned out they told me the wrong ones so we lost about a lot of years of our grandchildren's pictures. I hope you never have that happen to you. Now I have a Mac and feel so much more secure about it.Give that angel an extra hug and kiss for me. Thank you.

Anonymous

Thursday 12th of September 2013

I love these posts. I have to say that when I got my mixer, I thought to spare myself the bread kneading. My bread never turned out as good, so I went back to the hand kneading. I hope you have better luck, I but I LOVE it for baking cookies, etc....Elizabeth