Oma = good food and lots of fun!

Lily's Oma arrived on Thursday, when the sky opened up and Santa Barbara finally received it's due share of rain.  I guess instead of a Northwest drizzle, we like to take the rain in torrential downpours and then be done with it...thank you God for sunshine this weekend!  The weekend was filled with delightful treats, such as chocolates from Chocolate Maya, cheese from our local cheese shop, C'est Cheese, a trip to the farmer's market, a picnic in the wine country, croissants and decadent desserts from Renaud's Patisserie, and a few cooking projects, too!  Mom/Oma inspired me to take a few pictures of our adventures in the kitchen, so I hope you enjoy it!

As a side note, I have become addicted to a website that is a self-proclaimed "visual potluck," so if you enjoy food, check out tastespotting.com.  A picture on the website inspired me to try out an herb crust pizza dough.  For the recipe, click here.  So here it is during the rising process...

And, for toppings, we added a homemade tomato sauce with mozzarella, mini heirloom tomatoes, thinly sliced potatoes, asparagus and prosciutto.  Here is a photo just out of the oven:

Among other cooking endeavors were my mom's homemade "blitz" croissants (which we promptly filled with chocolate and left some to be pure butter croissants!), breakfast prosciutto cups filled with eggs and a side of sweet potato pancakes with cinnamon maple syrup, and then we indulged ourselves with making Thomas Keller's Buttermilk Fried Chicken accompanied with sweet potato biscuits and a side of baby broccoli with sweet yellow carrots.  For your enjoyment, here is a picture of the latter:

Although it may sound like we spent all weekend cooking, we had plenty of play time with little Miss Lily.  One of her favorite activities of all time is reading books!  Here is Mom reading a book she got for Lily this weekend on bugs with a whole variety of fun textures (she loves to scratch her little fingers on them):

Lily also had lots of floor time, where she could sit up and babble away, such as in this picture:

The fun new trick Lily decided to break out for Oma was an attempt to "army crawl" or in OT terms "crawl" (since what most people call crawling on all fours is actually called "creeping").  Just as Lily would reach for something, she brought up her knee to assist in pushing herself forward.  Sometimes during the weight shift she would roll herself over.  What a fun little girl!  Look for future posts with videos of this active little one!  

Thanks, Oma, for a fun weekend!