It's cold. Really cold. Week 4 of the ice and snow continues and the instinct to hibernate is a strong one in such conditions! Eating warming delicious food is really all I feel like doing at the moment (great for the waist-line, I know) so it's been 'stew-city' here lately. Last night I wanted to do something with beans - homemade baked beans. The humble baked bean in its bright bluey-green tin (you know which brand I'm talking about here) is such a ubiquitous part of contemporary life (especially here. There's a whole section of the supermarket dedicated to tinned baked beans...beans in more varieties and brands than you can imagine. You even get baked beans as a side dish at KFC - if you are the sort of person who goes to KFC. I'm not, but I live across the street from one, so I just know this), that we tend to forget that baked beans are actually a proper, hearty, delicious meal.
What I did...
Sauted some chopped onion and garlic in my gorgeous new casserole dish. Threw in a chopped cooking apple (and half a red and yellow pepper...purely because they were looking sad in my empty fridge, but actually they worked well!) and then a sprinkling of ground cumin. Added a tin of tomatoes, a can of haricot beans and then my special sauce: 1 heaped tsp of cornflour, 4 heaped tsp of brown sugar (I'm guessing here at quantities...it was about that much I think), about a tablespoon of soy and the same of red wine vinegar. This thickened the sauce and made it wonderfully tart and spicy. Then I brought it up to a simmer and bunged it in the oven at 170ish for about 2 and a half hours (it would have been ready sooner, but I left it cooking while we went to do the groceries. Lovely to come home to dinner already cooked!). Oh, I also threw in a packet of free-range pork sausages, but you could add bacon if you wanted, or pork belly. Or you could leave it vege. Before serving I stirred through half a packet of baby spinach (my nod to green vege) and then served it on rice. Yum.
Tonight the leftover rice will become Jess's special chicken and brown rice (which is actually just chicken fried rice, but I marinate the chicken in soy, ginger, brown sugar, sherry, garlic and sesame oil and then add the leftover marinade to the rice when cooking...hence, 'chicken and brown rice'. It's what my lad has always called it...).
V. jealous of the beautiful new cookware. How I lust after my own Le Creuset set...
ReplyDeleteThanks for this recipe! I had these amazing homecooked vegetarian baked beans at a cafe in Melbs on my last trip and have been hankering ever since. I ordered a side of mash which was perfect with them. Definitely going to give this a try.
Actually, I cooked some great Greek baked beans a while back for a Greek shared table - maybe I'll post the recipe. They were great, if I do say so myself :-)
Oh do - they sound great! Yum! And yes, mashed potato would have been the perfect accompaniment to these beans, but I've got a rice cooker which meant that the rice could prepare itself while we went and did the groceries, hence rice not spuds.
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