Spilling The Beans On Guinness Baked Beans

  Truth be told, I love baked beans. There are few meals that I enjoy more than a big bowl of baked beans and a generous side of coleslaw. To my taste, the crunch of the coleslaw perfectly complements the sweet/savory flavor of the baked beans. Throw in a piece of my neighbor Sarah’s world-class cornbread and I’m over the moon. So, naturally, I’m always on the lookout for creative new ways to prepare baked beans and the creative twist in this recipe, the use of Ireland’s famous Guinness Stout as the cooking liquid for the beans, fascinated me. This recipe is adapted from one that appears in Julie Van Rosendaal’s and Sue Duncan’s cookbook Spilling The Beans. Their book offers ways to incorporate healthy beans into your recipes at every meal. Yes, even for breakfast! While our British cousins have long savoured breakfast beans (baked beans on toast and baked beans as a part of a full English fry-up, for example), we yankees never have seemed to warm to the idea of putting beans on our breakfast plates. Spilling The Beans may change that. Spilling The Beans also makes a convincing case for the health benefits of consuming beans. Beans, they remind us, are high in fiber, rich in protein, cheap and their cultivation is easy on Mother Earth. They also have a long, long shelf life, so you can keep them handy in your pantry, either canned or in dry form, for use anytime you are moved to cook with them. And, don’t be afraid of cooking with dried beans either. Now that Instant Pots are cheap and pretty much ubiquitous in kitchens across the country, there is no reason not to prepare your own beans from scratch. It’s a cinch. While this recipe is wonderful (and you can sip a Guinness while you cook), you might also want to consider some of the other baked bean recipes I’ve posted on Blue Cayenne over the last three years. Just type “baked beans” into the search box to the right of this post and you will find baked beans with chipotles, baked beans baked with whiskey and a killer baked bean recipe using dates as the sweetener. Now where did I put that coleslaw with caraway seeds recipe? [mpprecipe-recipe:167] Spilling The Beans is available from Amazon: Spilling The Beans.