Beans, Beans, They’re Good for Your Snow-Day Dinner

It snowed here, today -- making it an especially good day to stay off the road to the supermarket and use up some of my ingredient excess. Stuck my head into the pantry and... Oyoyoy. Can someone please tell me how I ended up with two jars of molasses? (Molasses, which I normally use at a rate of about 1/4 cup per annum...So I need TWO jars exactly why?) Five jars of mustard (for real), and half-a-shelf full of canned beans? Someone? Anyone?

I don’t understand it, either. But I vaguely remembered seeing a recipe for bakes beans, once, that called for molasses and mustard. So I googled “baked beans,” got a basic sense of the how-to’s and proportions, added the frankfurters I had in the freezer, and threw in a splash of beer. (I sometimes put beer in my brisket, too. It adds a really nice -- and not at all "beer-y" --taste to slow-cooked meat.)

Then, while the beans took a long, sweet nap in the oven, I took a long, sweet nap in my bed. Two effortless hours later, snow-day dinner was served.

If you, yourself, are not currently stuck with the odd embarrassment-of-riches combination of molasses, mustard and frankfurters, you may not have occasion to make this particular pantry-purging dish…but the strategy I used is applicable to almost any ingredients you want to weed out of your own cupboard: Go to epicurious.com, food.com, or another big recipe website you trust, type in the name of a finished dish (e.g., baked beans) that you think might use some of the ingredients together, or  type the names of some of the individual ingredients you have on hand (beans, mustard, molasses) into the search bar together and just see what pops up. Tweak and adapt the recipe to suit your dietary needs (I left out the pork fatback that many baked beans recipes call for...) and the contents of your own pantry. Taste as you go along, adjust at whim, and see what you come up with. I wouldn't try it when the boss is coming to dinner. But for a snow-night supper? Go right ahead.

Here’s the recipe for the franks and beans:

1 large onion, diced

2 Tablespoons vegetable oil

5 beef frankfurters (or 4… or 6… whatever) cut into rounds

Two 15.5 ounce cans white beans, rinsed and drained (I used cannellini. Navy beans are fine, too.)

½ Cup molasses

¼ Cup Dijon mustard

¼ Cup ketchup (I use the Heinz organic, because it doesn’t have high fructose corn syrup. My kid, the ketchup maven, says it tastes exactly the same as the original.)

½ Cup mild-tasting beer (I used Miller).

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees.

In a stovetop-to-oven-safe pot or Dutch oven, over medium heat, sautee the onions and franks until the onions are soft and the franks deepen a bit in color – about 5 minutes. Drain off the extra fat from the pot.

Add the remaining ingredients, raise the heat to high and cook for five minutes, to evaporate some of the liquid and burn off the alcohol in the beer.

Cover pot, transfer to the oven, and bake for 1.5-2 hours.

Bean there. Done that.