A Few Pictures from our DC Trip

While our trip to Washington DC was mostly about visiting our best friends, who had the nerve to move away from Santa Barbara, we also spent some time seeing some of the amazing sights the city has to offer. This past political season was very interesting to me, and historical architecture has also inspired me since I was pretty young. The buildings and history in Washington were fantastic. I really encourage everyone to try and visit at some point if you are at all interested in history or politics or if you have children. We took the fantastic metro system nearly the entire time, including to and from Reagan airport to our friends' house in Silver Sring. In addition to the National Mall, we also visited Dupont Circle, Adam's Morgan and Georgetown (really cool neighborhoods), the National Spy Museum (very crowded, but fascinating), walked through some of Rock Creek Park, and visited the National Cathedral (so glad we didn't miss this!). We didn't have the camera with us for everything, but here are some pictures from when we did have it:

I was amazed at how beautiful the Capitol Building is!

This sounds trite, but this is a TALL building!

Lots of people around Mr. Lincoln...

Crazy to think how much gets done in this building (or not done, depending on your beliefs)

We visited Baltimore's Inner Harbor one evening

Dinner in Baltimore at Luna Del Sea - Great crab cakes (broiled, not fried!), but my fish left something to be desired. I loved everything that everyone else got, though!

Really cool fountain at the back of the National Cathedral

Front of the cathedral

Archway at the National Cathedral

Thanks to H & L for being the best tourguides ever! We miss you!

Stuffed Peppers

Today, my friends, I make a triumphant return to blogging after a bit of a hiatus. I have been busy this summer and not cooking as many new recipes, but I have a few saved up that I'd like to post about, and hopefully this will inspire me to find and create more recipes this fall.

The first recipe is one that didn't photograph well, but I think will be a good recipe with a few small adjustments. I didn't realize that my husband not only enjoys stuffed peppers, but his mom has a trusty recipe! I wish I'd known, I would have used hers! Instead, I used this recipe from allrecipes.com. I added low fat cheese, spicy V-8, and used very lean beef. In the future, I think I will use 85/15% beef instead, and I will definitely use regular instead of low fat cheese (which is the entire reason the picture looks so unappetizing). This is one of those recipes that needs a little fat to taste right. My husband made me laugh when he said "These are good, but my mom's recipe uses ground beef." He's so used to the turkey I use in everything, and the beef was so low fat, he didn't notice the difference when I finally used beef for once! I look forward to trying this again (or my mother-in-law's!) when the weather gets a little cooler.