September cooking, part 2!

The second new recipe I tried during September was chopped pepper steak.  This was also a biggest loser cookbook recipe.  Fairly simply - it involved making "steaks" out of ground beef, rice, and some other ingredients.  We had been eating a LOT of chicken in our house recently so I was grateful to find a new non-chicken recipe to try.
First, I made the mixture:

Looks awesome right?  Okay no, raw ground beef never looks appetizing.  Oh well.  Anyway, next I shaped it into steak patties to cook:

They look like nicely shaped hamburgers in that picture, right?  Siigh, if only they had stayed together that nicely.  The ended up more like this:

This is actually a consistent problem with me trying to make any sort of hamburger, meatball, etc.  If I'm supposed to shape meat to stay together, it WILL fall apart.  I think it's probably a lack of practice.. I've probably made hamburgers/this type of thing less than ten times in my life.  I will say that despite being a complete and total crumbly mess, the flavor was great!  I served this with a side of rice and a mix of cooked peppers/onions.

So, there you have it - I managed to make two new recipes in September!  I also ran really consistently.  I use the running AHEAD Training Log on Facebook to track my runs (good to know when it's time for new shoes), and a looking back I can say:

• I ran a total of 69.7 miles
• I had three long runs: 9.3 miles. 10.2 miles, and 7.8 miles
• I ran 16 times overall - which is basically every other day on average!
• My pace varied from 9:08 on a 2.7 mile run to 11:29 on my 10.2 mile run
• That being said, on most of my runs my pace was in the 10:20-10:40 range, which means I am getting faster over time (this summer it was more consistently around 11:00).

Well, it's 6 days into October, so perhaps I'll start posting about my October cooking and running soon :-)