Baked Beans

This dish has been a summer favorite for years. This recipe makes a good sized batch; enough for a party or enough to ensure lots of leftovers for the refrigerator. Heat leftover beans in a saucepan with a little water or chicken stock.

Ingredients

2 Qt chicken stock
1 pound bacon, diced
1 large Vidalia onion, diced
1 T fresh garlic, minced
1 pound dried navy beans, soaked overnight and drained
1/2 cup sugar syrup
1/2 cup light brown sugar
18 oz strained tomatoes
6 oz tomato paste
1/3 cup yellow mustard
kosher salt
2-3 bay leaves



Good ole' Oscar Mayer Bacon, diced, goes into a large pot to start this recipe. I like to dice the bacon with a cleaver on a plastic cutting board which goes right into the dishwasher afterward. Render the bacon stirring frequently until crispy. Add the diced onion and season. Add the beans and garlic and stir for a minute or two. Add remaining ingredients except the chicken stock and bay leaves and mix well.
Add 1 1/2 quarts chicken stock and bay leaves. Bring to a low boil and lower heat to simmer. Simmer for 45 minutes to an hour stirring occasionally and adding remaining chicken stock as needed. Beans should be covered with liquid throughout cooking. Add more chicken stock or water if necessary until the beans are tender, but firm. Remove bay leaves and serve.

Mmmmmmm. Bacon.

Don't forget to check those beans for pebbles, bad beans, etc., before they go into the pot. I have picked all sorts of stuff out of the dried beans.

Don't forget to take out the bay leaves. Bay leaves add wonderful flavor but they are not edible.

Grilled chicken cutlets served with rice and BrookeOK Baked Beans. A small bowl of liquid from the beans made a nice glaze for the chicken on the grill.

M,E,W,P,S,N,Se,F,Sh



Key: M,E,W,P,S,N,Se,F,Sh

Milk-free, Egg-free, Wheat-free, Peanut-free, Soy-free, Nut-free, Sesame-free, Fish-free, Shellfish-free

Always Read Labels

Chicken Cutlets

Chicken cutlets with baked potatoes.

Unless you are a fan of microwaved potatoes, this dish combines slow cooking baked potatoes with fast cooking chicken cutlets leaving plenty of time in the middle for garnish, salad and perhaps, dessert. The potatoes can also be cooked ahead of time for a convenient side.

Notes:

Everything is better with scallions.
The best potatoes are Maine potatoes.

A new KlubUni is coming soon.

Who wants to eat?

Pizza done right

Twenty or thirty seconds in the microwave removes much of the grease from pepperoni slices.
Thank you to Cook's Illustrated for the tip.


Dough from Capone Foods "00" pizza flour with sauce made from milled Roma tomatoes. A little salt and fresh oregano, basil, marjoram, thyme and rosemary or some Penzey's Italian Herb Mix adds authentic flavor. Rao's tomatoes are the best canned tomatoes. Fresh mozzarella is topped with a sautéd mixture of mushrooms, shallots and minced Small Farm garlic. Pepperoni and Canadian Bacon or ham are last to go on before the pizza goes into a hot oven.

A Birthday Request for Alton's Fried Chicken

GB&D

We stayed pretty close to Alton Brown's Fried Chicken recipe mixing paprika, garlic powder, cayenne pepper and salt with the flour to dredge the chicken before frying in organic non-hydrogenated all vegetable shortening at 325 degrees F.

Doesn't take long and it beats the heck out of KFC.

Mussels Mariniere et Provencale

Mussels Mariniere with a Provencal twist, this dish starts with sliced scallions and minced (Small Farm) garlic sweated in butter with chopped parsely and basil. Stir in a little tomato sauce before turning the heat up and adding some dry white wine.

In goes a couple of pounds of cleaned, debearded mussels -a quick stir- and on goes the lid. Five minutes later, all but one of the mussels are open and opaque. The closed mussel is discarded and the rest are served with salad and toast points.

Delicious. The Super Stop & Shop in Hudson, MA has an interesting seafood department. Sometimes the display of seafood looks exactly like you would expect the seafood to look in a supermarket display case. Keep in mind that this is New England and the competition for fresh seafood is abundant. Seafood lovers who are used to the display at places like Captain Marden's
are not likely to be impressed by a supermarket seafood department.

Somehow, Stop & Shop is putting some exceptional seafood on the shelf. Not always. Not even regularly, but often enough to make the seafood department a regular stop when you make your way through the store. Since they expanded the Stop & Shop to a Super Stop & Shop, the likelihood of spotting a beautiful wild-caught salmon fillet or some fresh sea scallops has made it well worth looking. You might be disappointed, but you just might change the menu for tonight.

These mussels were very clean and fresh. The 2 pounds of shellfish contained not a single one with a broken shell and all but one opened during steaming. One or two mussels were a little gritty, but they were all firm, fresh and flavorful.

It would be preferable for customers not to have to carry around yet another plastic card in order to pay non-artificially inflated prices at Stop & Shop and preferable to not be "earning" Stop & Shop gas credits at a gas station 20 miles away. (That means paying more for milk and bread to "earn" so called credits that expire before there is any chance of redeeming them.)

The Stop & Shop marketing department is working hard to rip customers off for a little bit here and a little bit there, which is a lot of money when you have as many customers as Stop & Shop does. Actually, to be precise; Stop & Shop is a subsidiary of Royal Ahold. (They own Giant, Peapod and a number of grocery related businesses globally.) The marketing schemes might be Stop & Shop's work but it might just be Royal Ahold's.

The seafood department is worth a look.

Verrill Farmstand is gone

According to the owners, they will rebuild. In the meantime many regular customers including top area restaurants (No. 9 Park, Hamersley's Bistro, Lumiere and Jasper White's Summer Shack to name only a few), will have to find their fresh produce elsewhere.