You Don't Get Your Burgers Out of a Can...

…and you shouldn’t get your go-withs that way, either. With burgers up for Saturday night, I needed a couple easy but untrite accompaniemens…accompanamuns…side dishes. And, dammit, I was makin’ ‘em homemade or I wasn’t makin’ ‘em at all.


Baked beans. Classic, right? And if you make them from scratch, a two day job. Dude. This is the 2010s. Here’s how to make really, really delicious baked beans with little time and essentially no work.

First, mix the ingredients pictured above

in a baking dish of size appropriate

to the number of guests you’ll have

at your table. Add them to your taste.

Around here, we like plenty of mustard,

Worcestershire, and a scoop of tomato 

sauce in lieu of catsup (although catsup

works. Hell, this is baked beans. Pretty 

much ANYTHING is gonna work).

Don’t forget your secret ingredient. In this 

case, a small piece of fresh orange peel stuck

with a clove. To be honest, I was out of ground

cloves and I couldn’t figure out how to put in a 

whole one in such a fashion that I could retrieve 

it later so that nobody would chomp it and freak out.

The orange peel idea was sheer genius. 

Don’t forget your other secret ingredient. Bacon.

There is pretty much nothing on earth that isn’t 

better with bacon. 

Anyway. Mix up your sauce, add a couple slices of bacon diced, put in beans from a can (avoiding the necessity of planning a day ahead so beans can be soaked overnight, I didn’t drain the canned beans in advance, just slurped ‘em out with a spoon draining them as I went so that a modicum of the starchy liquid accompanied them), gently stir the whole thing.

I used Goya pintos. All Goya 

products are outstanding, 

especially their beans. 

Sauce ready for beans. 

Beans and sauce ready to be 

baconned. 

Beans, sauce and bacon ready for

the oven.

Stick the little pot of baconned beans into an oven at lowish temperature (say 300 to 350 degrees Fahrenheit) for as long as it takes to get them simmered, thick, and crisped (the latter for the bacon on top).

Beans finished and ready to 

rock and roll. 

Ok, we got burgers topped with choice of French and Danish blue cheeses or cheddar served on those nifty little frozen European style roles that are mostly pre-baked but take 5 minutes in the oven to brown and crisp. We got really, really rich and spicy beans. Now we need something lighter, fresher. Something, say, slaw-ish.


Assemble slaw-ish dressing ingredients. I only used high quality, unfiltered cider vinegar and a bit of not-completely-refined sugar. Oh, plus salt and pepper.

Pretty much all you need

to dress some slaw-ish.

Assemble some slaw-ish vegetables. In this case, a kohlrabi, half a jicama, and a big apple.

Slaw-ish vegetables.

Julienne the vegetables. Dress them. Put them in the frig for a couple hours, spooning the dressing over them whenever you think of it. 

Slaw-ish ready to rock and roll.

Chow down. Hard to come up with a simpler or more delicious Saturday night dinner. Or at least simpler. I was the only one who ate much of the slaw-ish. But the beans and burgers were certainly popular!


Anyway. If you're snowed in and need some entertainment, please wax up those skis (do you know that you put wax on the bottom of skis but the top of surfboards? Hard to believe in the 2000s that we need to use wax for ANYTHING in either case) and scoot on over to:
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Thanks for stoppin' by!