Trying to be good...

...but there are so many food temptations around come fall.  I have two, yes, TWO, pear pies in the oven right now.  See, I happened across a giant bag of delicious pears on Saturday, had a really busy weekend and am now scrambling to use them up.  So one pear pie for me, and one to head to my inlaws this evening.  Hopefully it's yummy as I'm not much of a pie maker but drew inspiration from a few different recipes and threw my favorite parts of each into one pie shell.  

I have been better about cooking healthy meals at home though.  I made a huge batch of venison, cabbage and barley soup.  I ate that for about a week.  Mental note...next time freeze some!  I do love that soup though. It's a recipe I happened across, tweaked it a bit (way  more veggies and half the sugar) and cook it in the pressure cooker.  Because, well, why not?  

I also made some oven fries and blackened walleye (caught locally in Lake Erie by my skilled husband).  Matt had this awesome fry cutter when I met him.  It doesn't work so well on a tough root veggie like a sweet potato unfortunately but on good old russet potatoes it makes cutting fries SOOOOO easy. 

While I was on a roll cooking locally harvested wild game, last night I cooked up some braised rabbit using one of my favorite recipes from Wegmans, Braised Hunter-Style Chicken.  It works for chicken, rabbit, squirrel...  They have a crock pot version of the recipe too if that's more your style.  Either way and whatever you're cooking, I highly recommend trying this recipe.  I served mine over polenta last night.  I'd say this is a pretty healthy meal too as long as you keep the polenta in check. 

All this healthy eating in the past few days has been to make up for this:

That is a loaf of harvest bread I made at a class on Friday evening.  It was taught by a woman I met on a Facebook page dedicated to cooking.  She prepared the dough for us and then taught us how to make it in to shapes.  I went for the rosettes.  Do you see rosettes?  I do!
  

And it was DELICIOUS!  I ate so much of it that night I ran 6 miles Saturday morning. And a wonderful 6 miles they were.  I've run three times since my half marathon and I feel awesome.  I'm a little surprised actually given how I felt a few weeks before when I went to the doctor and side-lined myself until Ragnar.  It's amazing what some stretching and strength training will do!  I also attended a Good Form Running clinic at a local running store, Fleet Feet, on Sunday morning.  Trying REALLY hard to figure out what causes me to fall apart right when I start to increase my miles.  This week is tough though.  Have a lot going on.  Managed to snag two quick miles yesterday before heading to the craft show at Letchworth with my mom, sister and nieces, using the new stuff I learned Sunday, mostly increasing my cadence to 180 steps per minutes which was HARD!  And trying to keep my arms along my sides instead of crossing my body.  Also harder than I imagined.  But all these changes should help my run efficiency score (more about that next time!) and make me a "better" runner.

Work has been busy and will be through Saturday evening,  I am really looking forward to Sunday when I can hopefully sit back and relax.  I know this is terrible, but I told my mom if she has an apple pie for me Sunday I'll come visit.  :-P  What do you think...should Lexa and I head into the burbs for a visit??  

I really only mentioned that so I had an excuse to share this picture of Lexa I took today.  She was trying so hard to get my attention while I ate my lunch.  She knows this makes me laugh.  

I'm curious...anyone else out there make pear pie?   

If so, do you use cinnamon or nutmeg?  Maybe ginger? 

***Updated***
Apparently the link to the cabbage soup recipe raised security concerns on some computers so here is a picture of it: