Weekend Plans Post: Molasses Baked Beans and Laparoscopy

I don’t know that I’d have time to write this on Thursday so I wrote it yesterday.

Okay. Back on Groundhog’s Day, we were supposed to go to the hospital to get Maribou some medical treatment for some stuff that made the guy with the ultrasound say “huh”. We thought that she’d have a 50/50 shot of having to spend the night but, as it turns out, there was an insurance boondoggle and we had it rescheduled for April Fool’s Day which, we thought, would be plenty of time to have insurance figure itself out.

Well, we had a bunch of additional boondoggles (including last-minute boondoggles) but all of the ducks are in enough of a row that even the insurance app has a green check on our scheduling calendar. So this weekend will be spent recovering.

Part of the prep to get to this point involved Molasses Baked Beans.

This is another one from the Better Homes and Garden cookbook.

4 15-ounce cans Great Northern beans, red or white kidney beans, black beans, and/or butter beans, rinsed and drained
1 8-ounce can tomato sauce
3/4 cup Canadian-style bacon (3 1/2 ounces)
1/4 cup molasses
2 tablespoon vinegar
2 teaspoons dry mustard
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon pepper

1. In a 3 1/2 to 4-quart slow cooker combine all ingredients
2. Cover; cook on low-heat setting for 5 to 6 hours or on high-heat setting for 2 1/2 to 3 hours

That’s pretty much how we made them. We doubled everything and didn’t do the pepper but everything else was there. (I think the Canadian bacon is sold in packs of 8 ounces so it got an extra ounce of Canadian bacon and isn’t worse off for it.) Our bean theory was that we’d go 1/4 Great Northern, 1/4 red kidney, 1/4 black, and 1/4 navy. That’s a pretty good mix, we found out.

We’ve made this recipe 3 or 4 times now and so the main experimentation was between white wine vinegar and apple cider vinegar (the kind with the mother!) and we decided that apple cider was the way to go. When it comes to molasses, the big question is whether we’d go with Grandma’s Original Unsulphured Molasses or with Brer Rabbit Unsulphured Molasses.

I find the Brer Rabbit packaging marginally more attractive but when you look at the “since” dates, you’ll see that Grandma’s has a full 17 years on Brer Rabbit. “Since 1890” won for the first batch of beans and those were pretty good… but the second batch used Brer Rabbit and I think that Brer Rabbit has a better flavor for this sort of thing despite being a relative newcomer at “Since 1907”.

On Tuesday, Maribou told me that she was on the last day that she would be allowed to eat anything particularly interesting and so I decided that the best sendoff would be our baked beans ladled onto a baked potato:

And I made myself one too:

Anyway: MAKE THESE BEANS. THEN PUT THEM ON A BAKED POTATO.

Or, I suppose, in a bread bowl:

And, when you double the recipe, YOU HAVE A TON OF LEFTOVERS. Seriously, we’ll have leftovers that will take us to Wednesday.

As such, this weekend will be spent eating beans and recovering.

So… what’s on your docket?