Baked Beans and a Giveaway from Molly MacRae

 

Baking beans in your oven, long and slow on a cold winter day, warms your house through and through. They warm you again when you sit down to eat them. One day last month, when the temperature didn’t reach zero, I baked these beans and a loaf of bread and we felt snug as bugs. Here’s a link to the bread recipe. Read on for the beans.

Note: Except for the molasses, all measurements are approximate (and a good baseline to work from). If I have cooked beans in the freezer, I use about 4 cups. If I have a one-pound bag of dry beans, I use that. Onions vary in size. For the ketchup, mustard, salt, and pepper, I eyeball them as I add them.  

Baked Beans

Ingredients

1 pound black beans (you can also use navy, pinto, great Northern, etc., the beans you see in the picture have already been soaked and cooked)

½ cup molasses

1 large onion, chopped

1 cup ketchup

1 tablespoon mustard (I use brown or Dijon but yellow is fine, too)

2 teaspoons salt

¼ teaspoon pepper

Do you see my 46-year-old copy of More-With-Less Cookbook in the background of the ingredients picture? My recipe is based on the recipe for Basic Baked Beans in the book but over those 46 years I’ve changed every ingredient or measurement. It’s a wonderful, adaptable recipe.

Directions

Rinse beans. Put them in a kettle and cover by several inches with cold water. Bring to a boil. Turn off heat and let sit for one hour. Return to the boil then simmer until tender – 20 to 30 minutes. Drain, reserving the liquid.

Preheat oven to 275-300 degrees.

Combine beans and all other ingredients in a 2-quart bean pot, Dutch oven, or casserole dish. Add bean liquid to cover. Bake 4 to 8 hours. Cover during first half of baking time. Stir occasionally and add more bean liquid as needed.

Readers: What food or drink keeps you warm in the depths of winter? Answer in the comments, with your email address, for a chance to win an advance reading copy of Come Shell or High Water, book 1 in my new Haunted Shell Shop Mysteries.

 

Come Shell or High Water—book #1 in my new Haunted Shell Shop Mysteries—comes out June 25, 2024, and is available for pre-order now!

 In the meantime, you can enjoy my other books.

 

The Boston Globe says Molly MacRae writes “murder with a dose of drollery.” She’s the author of the award-winning, national bestselling Haunted Yarn Shop Mysteries and the Highland Bookshop Mysteries. As Margaret Welch, she writes books for Annie’s Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and she’s a winner of the Sherwood Anderson Award for Short Fiction. Visit Molly on Facebook and Pinterest and connect with her on Twitter  or Instagram.