Baked beans strike out

Baked beans have not been part of my family tradition. Maybe Daddy didn't like 'em. Maybe Mama couldn't make 'em. For whatever reason, I can only remember encountering them at one of our wonderful family reunions when I was a kid. There was, however, too much potato salad, fried chicken, and banana pudding to think much about baked beans.

Nowadays, however, I have begun to dabble in the baking of beans. This mostly involves grabbing a can of this or that bean and seeing what develops. A couple of days ago I did some of that dabbling and came up with disaster.

It all started out really well. I partially drained cans of:

• pork and beans,
• black beans,
• pinto beans

and dumped them all in a pan. They looked yummy, and I knew they would taste yummy when I took them out of the oven.

The problem started when I opened the can of plain diced tomatoes instead of the can of tomatoes with chiles. I had to compensate with red pepper flakes, since I didn't want to use a whole can of chiles to go with the tomatoes. Oops! I overcompensated. Too much red pepper.

Strike two came when I thought some celery might be good to add. I had already chopped about 2/3 of a large onion and added that. More chopping didn't appeal to me. I was already tired of standing, so I opted for celery seed. I've been using dried celery flakes for some of my stir frying, but am not very experienced with celery seed. Who knew how much flavor those little buddies carried? Again, too much of a good thing.

Strike three came when I took the beans out of the oven. I had baked them for 30 minutes at 425 degrees. Then, when it was time to broil the pork ribs, I switched the oven over to broiling, raised the temp, and placed the ribs above the beans to keep the beans from burning. That wasn't strike three. Strike three was when I realized that I hadn't put any meat in the beans. I had been thinking about it, wishing I had some sausage to throw in. It was only when I took the pan out of the oven that I realized that I had plenty of my old standby (bacon) and could have used that for flavor. *sigh*

As it turned out, the peppers didn't kill us, and the celery seed was tolerable. I dipped out pan juices from the pork ribs to add some extra taste to the beans. We did well enough, but next time I think I will do more chopping and pay more attention to what I'm putting in the pan. Or not. :)