Zingy Baked Beans

Sometimes picking a recipe from my many, many bookmarked options is easy. Sometimes it’s Sunday afternoon and we spend a couple hours sifting through choices and finally just settle on something because we really need both dinner and a blog post.

Today’s recipe was one of the latter. I do have to admit, though, the dude’s face and bow tie are a pretty strong incentive to try these beans. If they make him light up like that, they must be pretty good… right?

Try these TABASCO BAKED BEANS

1 1-lb. can baked beans
2 tbsps. pickle relish
1 tbsp. prepared mustard
1/4 tsp. TABASCO
4 slices bacon

Mix beans with pickle relish, mustard, and TABASCO in shallow baking dish. Top with bacon. Bake in moderate oven (350°F.) 30 minutes. Serves 4.

I also found the ad copy describing the Tabasco sauce to be pretty funny. Oh, sorry, it isn’t sauce, it’s liquid pepper seasoning. I guess men also love being extremely pedantic about what their Tabasco sauce liquid pepper seasoning is called. Accurate ingredient description should give these beans a special little something.

Buzz had to go to the store for all the ingredients except bacon. (Which seems counter-intuitive — who has bacon, but not mustard?)

The beans didn’t look very plentiful.

Buzz had to fold the bacon around in order to get decent coverage. (We realized later that it probably would have been better to cut the bacon into bite-size pieces first, both to simplify bean coverage, and also to avoid having to cut bacon when eating. Our children are shockingly bad at cutting bacon.)

Aside from shriveling the bacon (and heating the beans of course), there wasn’t much change in the dish.

It doesn’t look like much besides baked beans, but this was great. It had a nice tang to it, plus big pieces of bacon. I think having high-quality bacon was a big plus here — or really in any recipe — since it’s got much more flavor than typical cheap, uninteresting bacon. Even though I’d worried that the Tabasco would be too much for the kids, it wasn’t spicy at all, and they ate it quickly and happily. Definitely a winner.

Retro Adverto isn’t always about food advertising, but when it is, it’s zingy…