Wednesday
Cooked a quart of beans - put in the back of the fridge
Friday
Used some leftover steak marinade to make BBQ sauce
Put 4 chicken tenders in fridge to thaw
Saturday
Made cornbread muffins to use the already-on oven
Sunday morning:
Assembled the chicken and beans and put on timed-bake
Sunday noon:
Threw a few more vegetables in leftover green salad
Set table
Put muffins in warm oven to freshen
The chicken and beans is a nifty quick dish my mother taught me. I'll tell you the amounts I used, but surely you can see it's easy to double or add other goodies.
In 9x9 baking dish, put 4 chicken tenders (equivalent to 2 boneless skinless chicken breasts). Next, a few slices of onion. Then a quart of cooked beans, mostly drained. Some more onion slices. On top, pour over at least two cups BBQ sauce - it should totally cover the stuff underneath because you're going to bake it for an hour at 350 and you don't want it to dry out.
This is great served with coleslaw and maybe a bread to complement the beans and mop up sauce.
In the afternoon, lazing on the sofa with this new library book, I was tickled to come across the following quote in the section on New England, written by James Francis Davis sometime in the 1930s:
"In many New England homes, to this day, baked beans - usually with brown bread - are a Saturday night ritual. The custom once was, and still is in some Yankee households, to serve them for both Saturday night supper and Sunday morning breakfast, and the reason for it was primarily religious. . . What food was eaten on Sunday must have been wholly prepared on a weekday. . .Sunday dinner was more of yesterday's roast or corned beef, cold, with the remaining vegetables heated up. Supper was cold meat, bread and butter, cake, cookies, and preserves. For these fully adequate and appetizing meals no cooking whatever had to be done on Sunday. The only domestic labor was heating up food, making coffee and tea, and washing dishes."
Our Sunday supper is invariably popcorn, cheese, fruit, and any random leftovers; yesterday I actually made a simple sponge cake (Carla's Hot Milk Sponge Cake from More with Less) to eat with strawberries and whipped cream. I make exceptions to Sabbath rest for strawberries!
5 comments:
That looks and sounds delicious! What beans did you use - navy beans? Every so often my mother will bake Boston Baked Beans in a crock in the oven. They're my favorite!
Oh yes, to the Saturday baked bean ritual I can attest...being married to a dyed-in-the-wool Boston Irish Catholic. Around these parts everyone grew up that way, and you know what? It makes life easier to know what you are having!
Navy beans are best, don't you think?
Where DO you find these books, dear? Was it on the shelves or did you get in on inner-library loan?
Oh, drat. I did it again... it's me.....R
Laura, I used up some dry limas and then threw in some pintos because it didn't look like enough. I've used every kind of bean in baked beans!
Leila, I'm just fascinated because the only time I heard about Saturday/Sunday baked beans was from this book! Now tell me about Boston brown bread: must that go with the baked beans too? I made it once and I was not a fan.
Reb, it was recommended by several blogs and I always look first by computer at the library. He also wrote Salt, which I'm curious about too.
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