Home Sweet Home and Baked Beans

How sweet it is to be home again--a chance to see My Prince, a chance to settle down into my own comfy space, and another chance to see what's happening in my own cupboards. Before I went out my first morning home, I rummaged around in the freezer to see what I might use for dinner and came up with some pork loin. I spent most of the rest of the day trying to figure out what to do with it.

Come supper time, I finally came up with a menu:

• leftover salad
• steamed brown rice
• baked beans
• sauteed medallions of pork loin
  

I started preparations by putting the brown rice in the steamer. No salt.

For the baked beans, I sauteed rings of a large onion until they were translucent. Putting them in a glass baking dish, I added a can of black beans (undrained), a can of garbanzo beans (partially drained), a can of kidney beans (partially drained), and a can of diced tomatoes (undrained). I seasoned with garlic powder and red pepper flakes. I figured the cans had enough salt not to need more. I gave this a quick stir and put it in the oven at 375 degrees. After a while I decided to turn it up to 425 degrees so that the liquids would cook down faster.

The next activity involved checking the refrigerator for leftover vegetables that My Prince had avoided in my absence. Sure enough, there were a couple of cucumbers, some tomatoes, onions, and a few small carrots. I pulled out enough for a decent sized bowl of salad and began chopping. I diced a small onion, cut up half a large cucumber (julienne style), sliced a handful of the small carrots, and hacked around on the tomato until I got it into small but nondescript pieces. I mixed all of this in bowl with a splash of olive oil and a bigger splash of apple cider vinegar (it's all I had). I added some salt, powdered Splenda, and a little garlic. Measurements are vague because I didn't actually measure--just splashed and sprinkled. This salad, however, got the best raves of the lot from My Prince, who especially liked the dressing.

I decided to slice the pork loin into medallions for breading and sauteing (yeah, I checked; that's how you spell it). I used some seasoned bread crumbs and a small amount of vegetable oil over fairly high heat. The medallions cooked quickly and crisped up nicely.

We still have some baked beans and rice left over, but the salad and the pork medallions disappeared quickly. The whole meal took less than an hour of prep time and cooking. Between the raw veggies, the brown rice, and the beans, I think we did very well on fiber tonight.

Carbs are another issue. I made an effort to try to figure out the carbs in the bean dish since the labels on the cans could help on this.

• Garbanzo beans, ~3 servings with 17 g carbs and 6 g fiber per serving (3 x [17-6])= 33 g
• Kidney beans, 3.5 x (16 - 5) = 38.5 g
• Black beans, 3.5 x (19 - 5) = 49.0
• Diced tomatoes, 3.5 x (5 - 1) = 14.0
• Onion, 16.2 (maybe)
  
• garlic powder, 0
• pepper flakes, 0

That means that the whole bowl of baked beans would have 150.7 carbs. It looks like it would have 13.5 servings at about 11 g per serving (fiber has already been subtracted). What, however, is a serving? By the time I pulled the baked beans out of the oven, My Prince had finished his salad and was standing in the kitchen, filching tastes of the pork medallions. Who's gonna start dividing a hot bowl of baked beans in to 13.5 parts at that point? Not I.

So I had to settle for healthy. We'll have to figure out some other way to start calculating carbs and measuring servings. We want healthy meals, but we also need to work on portions and blood sugar control.