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Baked bean sandwich.

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5 comments on Baked bean sandwich.

One of my new favorite vegetarian dinners is slow-cooked baked beans — you know, the sweet kind with molasses and maple syrup — Boston brown bread (more maple syrup in that), and veggies, preferably including cabbage of some kind.  We had it last night. I stir-fried the cabbage with onion, and steamed green beans to serve on the side.

The baked beans take some planning.  The small white beans have to be soaked overnight, then cooked for a couple of hours in plain water in the slow cooker.  Then I drain the beans and put them into the slow cooker — at about 9 pm — with ketchup, maple syrup, molasses, a peeled onion studded with a few cloves, salt, 1 tsp baking soda, and pepper.  I top it off with boiling water from the kettle, a half-inch past the top of the beans.  It cooks on low all night and all the next day. By dinner time — twenty hours after I started the cooker, and two days after I put the beans in to soak — the top is crusty brown caramel and the middle is soft and mushy, and it's sweet all the way through.

I suppose I could serve it with meat, and my choice would be a grilled ham steak, but why bother?  The kids eat the brown bread and the beans, and everyone's full and happy by the end of the evening.

 Today I'm going to have a baked bean sandwich for lunch.  Some yummy ideas in there.  I can't decide — should I mix it with celery, onion, and walnuts, and eat it cold, or warm it up and spread it on bread and eat it open faced with a fried egg on top?  The bacon sounds good, but I'm not planning on bacon today.  Whatever — I intend to enjoy it.

UPDATE:  I went with the celery/onion/nuts version, using pecans.  Indeed, very yummy.  I think there is no way I will be hungry again before dinner.

Comments

5 responses to “Baked bean sandwich.”

  1. Christy P Avatar
    Christy P

    I don’t know if you remember my Grandma Lucille (we stayed at their home on the way to visit Purdue once) – anyway, I recall her telling a story of carrying baked bean sandwiches in her lunch pail to school (Nebraska in the 1920’s and Depression) and still enjoying them as an adult. We had baked beans last night, at Z’s request for ‘brown beans’.

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  2. bearing Avatar
    bearing

    Yes, I remember that visit!
    Funny that we had the same dinner last night. My kids call them “sweet beans,” and the bread “sweet brown bread.” I could eat the bread for dessert, frankly.
    I was thinking about your gingerbread recipe here – http://cjzp.blogspot.com/2008/08/never-fail-gingerbread.html – and wondering how it would do sweetened with maple syrup instead of molasses. What do you think?

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  3. Christy P Avatar
    Christy P

    We had baked beans with roasted garlic and gruyere chicken sausage on buns. It was a meat day.
    Regarding the maple gingerbread – You could try it, but I like the molasses-y-ness of the original. There would not be a 1:1 conversion either, as maple syrup is much more sweet and has less viscosity. I have occasionally thought of trying to make gingerbread cupcakes or muffins since I like it much more than my husband. What stops me is that my favorite part is the collapsed, extra moist square in the middle. Edges are not the best part of gingerbread, unlike brownies (which work very well baked in a muffin tin btw).

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  4. CJ Avatar
    CJ

    Oh, I love baked bean sandwiches! Mine are open-faced: slice of bread, layer of beans, slice of tomato, slice of cheese, run it under the broiler until the cheese bubbles. Yum!
    Say, have you ever seen the trick of adding a pinch of baking soda to the beans while they’re parboiling? I saw it in Tightwad Gazette and it does soften up the beans lickety-split. But I’ve read that it’s a terrible idea to add baking soda to vegetable cooking water because it destroys vitamins, and I’m wondering if it’s similarly unwise to do so with beans.
    Any thoughts?

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  5. Christy P Avatar
    Christy P

    We live in an area with very hard water, and I always add 1/4t of baking soda per 1 pound of beans to the soaking water. Otherwise they can soak all day and sometimes never soften. I don’t put it in the cook water though.

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