Black Bean Veggie Burgers

I was a very, very bad girl this weekend. My brother John, whom we just visited in San Diego, came back for a very, very brief visit to see the rest of the fam.

We drove to Bangor on Friday night for a visit on John’s last night here. I … drank too much. It was a night that went from this:

My sister Jean and I at 10 p.m.

To this:

Me and one of my besties, Tom, circa last call.

I have like, 10 videos on my phone from the floor of the van (where I most assuredly assure you, I was a passenger) and no memory of the above picture being taken.

I was not in a good place on Saturday morning. If I keep following the intermediate marathon plan, I needed to run 7 miles on Saturday. And I didn’t. Being too hungover is the lamest of the lame excuses for missing a run and it overcast my whole weekend.

(For the record, Friday night was awesome. It made me happy in the purest and simplest of ways to just have my whole family and my good friends together — something that doesn’t happen very often any more.)

I still felt likes shit when I got up on Sunday morning. Which says something about how hungover I was. I was scheduled to run 15 for today’s long run, and was meeting up with my friends for 9 of them. I thought that I could run to them for the 6 I needed to make up, but I could not make myself get out of bed on time.

And then, when I got there, I still wasn’t sure that I could make myself run for 3 hours.

But we started. And I started to feel better. The weather was beautiful and the company was wonderful..

You just have to get the idea in your head, you know, that this is what you have to do and, goddammit, you’re going to do it. I didn’t let myself think that I could stop after 9 and you know? I wasn’t even really tempted to stop after we got back to the house and the cars and comfy couches and tall glasses of water …

My friend and another blogger I follow, One Mom in Maine, did the Clean Food Challenge again last week. I’m not up for going gluten-free all week this week, but I am going to do a mini-detox tis week. The detox is essentially no processed food and no drinking.

I made her recipe for Black Bean Veggie burgers for dinner tonight, with a few modifications.

Topped with mexican blend heese, avocado dip, and bbq sauce. And a spinach and stawberry salad.

Black Bean Veggie Burgers

Ingredients:

  • 1 can of black beans, drained
  • 1 cup of cooked quinoa (1/3 c dry)
  • 2 tbsp chopped garlic
  • 1 tbsp cumin
  • 2 tbsp chili garlic sauce (for punch! Find it in that Thai food section)
  • 1 egg
  • ~1/2 c breadcrumbs

We combined the black beans, quinoa, egg, and seasonings in the blender in small batches, since we don’t have a food processor. I found that it was about as easy to mash the beans with a spoon as it was to get the blender to mix up the beans. The breadcrumbs aren’t in Emilie’s recipe, but I found I needed to add them because the initial mixture came out kinda soupy, like this:

I also added a lot more seasonings and the chili garlic sauce to taste because I love my food spicy. 🙂

I topped mine with Mexican Cheese, avocado dip, and tomato and onion and barbecue sauce. On the side we had a spinach, strawberry and sunflower seed salad with balsamic vinaigrette and it was deliciously amazing. I feel so full of fiber and iron and protein and vitamin C.

And to bring this blog post back around, as I was finishing my 15-mile run today, John called me to let me know how his half-marathon went this morning. He flew back yesterday just in time to run it. He undershot his (ambitious) goal by almost 3 minutes on 5 hours of sleep after a day of travelling. I’m so proud of him. 🙂

 

Pattie Reaves

About Pattie Reaves

I'm a new mom and renegade fitness blogger at After the Couch. I live in Brewer with my husband, Tony, our daughter Felicity, and our two pugs, Georgia and Scoop.