Hannah: “Some people get paid to blog as a full time job.”

My mother: “And some people need to spend more time on their spiritual life and reading their Bible.”

That’s right ladies and gentlemen (Who am I kidding? Gentlemen don’t really figure in my constituency), my mama was in town this weekend and all last week. She had a conference all week but that left her free in the evening to see the sites of the city with me. I was going to have an amazing blog post for you this morning, one with beautiful pictures of our many adventures around the city. But I don’t have much more than that one photo above and some delightfully blurry iphone pictures of us having a slumber party at the hotel to prove that we did anything beyond what this post is about to become about: food.

With my brother and sister-in-law-to-be we hit some of the DC restaurants that I have been wanting to try. The type that James and I usually avoid as a couple, meaning small plates and overly pretentious descriptions. After a couple tapas style dinners where we paid way too much for too little food, we have basically decided that we are not a couple who “does” tapas and are just waiting till this small plate craze ends and we can all go back to meals that entail day-after leftovers. We also dined at places with obscene waits and most of the ocean on the menu, two other things that James and I typically skip together. In fact, we generally skip eating out all together, and in my current single girl state I basically eat weird greens and eggs, hence the blessed joy of a week of other people doing dishes and serving up exciting dishes. Here are some of our culinary highlights of the week:

Farmers, Fishers, Bakers: The seaside cousin of our eternal favorite Founding Farmers. Awesome shrimp and grits, my current restaurant obsession. Bonus points for the fact that there was a precious scientist outside who had built a telescope and let us look at a something something color nebula. Yes, it looked like a barely noticeable blue dot, but I feigned excitement all the same.

Baked and Wired: Yes, it is silly to wait in line for 30 minutes for a cupcake. But oh the cupcake! Worth it. Even if any cupcake would be improved by turning into a cake of which I could have leftovers for breakfast (see aforementioned logic regarding small plates), these were pretty much as good as it gets.

Rose’s Luxury: I’ll admit, when the Washingtonian first ran a review, I trotted off as always to check it out… and was instantly turned off by the menu. Small plates of weird food. No thank you. But when Bon Appetit rated it #1 for new restaurants and everyone started talking about it, I remembered how much I love a good bandwagon and hightailed it to get on.  I waited in line for 45 minutes to put my name on the list and then we waited  another 2.5 hours for our table, mercilessly less than the 3-4 hours we were originally quoted. And it was worth every last minute. Twice over.  I’m not really sure exactly what we ate, but I know we spent the whole meal just discussing the symphony of taste happening at that table. At one point there was a cake made out of English peas that had been soaked in buttermilk and I was more than ok with that. Black magic. Wonderful, edible, black magic.

After this week I basically feel like I need to jump on another bandwagon and Whole-30 myself back to health. Can you use Whole-30 as a verb? If not, we should, and the whole Interworld is Whole-30ing themselves. Can you eat cakes made out of peas on the Whole-30?