Homemade baked beans

August 22, 2013

We spent the morning playing with our puppy. Ok. So we spent the day playing with our puppy. Ha. I picked a few goodies from the garden today (green beans and lettuce) while my son picked and snacked on green onions. Crazy kid.

I wanted to make a pot of baked beans for lunch. I got a recipe for semi-homemade beans from my hubby's cousin. The base of it is a can of store bought baked beans and then you add in more beans and some homemade sauce. We made them for my son's birthday and everyone loved them (my son included who normally doesn't like baked beans). Today I wanted to eliminate the store bought beans. I wanted it all homemade so I would know exactly what was in it. I started out by cooking up some onion in olive oil. I added 2 cups each of lima beans, small white beans, and black eyed peas (all cooked from dry beans and then frozen). I decided to double the recipe for sauce seeing as I had eliminated the store bought can. I added in a cup of brown sugar, a cup of water, a cup of ketchup, 4 teaspoons of vinegar, and 2 teaspoons of mustard. They were delicious. There is no need to start out with any store bought variety. I may try to cut back on the brown sugar next time. They weren't too sweet for me; it is just the thought of putting so much sugar in it. I made melty subs to go along with our beans. The meat eaters started out with ham and pepperoni. We all had sauteed onion, mushrooms, garlic, and green peppers. I used provolone and muenster cheese on them. Under the broiler until melty, and then it is time to add on arugula and avocado. I put out four types of homemade pickles for everyone to choose from. Yum. Double Yum. 

I worked on a large pot of black beans today to freeze. I ended up with five bags after my daughter kept stealing from my pot! For dinner, I half way took the easy way out. We heated up the leftover lasagna rolls. I cooked some corn on the cob. We had more of the Italian bread with garlic butter. We had salad again with all of the fixings (lettuce, arugula, baby kale, green onion, carrot, green pepper, peas). My daughter made a batch of her famous deviled eggs. The secret (shhhh don't tell her I told you) is using garlic and wine seasoning from The Melting Pot. Wow. Kind of makes me wish we just had a plateful of deviled eggs for dinner!