GASTRONORMOUS

As I mentioned the other day, the all-American menu for Election night consisted of: baked beans, corn casserole, a salad, and apple pie. As you can tell from the pictures, this isn’t the most attractive meal you have ever seen, but it was darned tasty.

Since I had to accomplish the both baked beans, salad, and pie after work (plus, the Predicate was bringing the corn casserole, which would need to get heated up in the oven), I jumped into action immediately after coming home from work.

I started with the pie as I wanted to give that as much time as possible to set after baking, as per the instruction which stated it needed to sit at room temperature for 3-4 hours before eating. Luckily, because of the apple peeling-coring-slicing machine I have, I was able to prepare a pie’s worth of apples in less than 10 minutes (aftermath, left), which was awesome. I pretty much followed the apple pie recipe from The Joy of Cooking, except added more cinnamon and less sugar than that recipe calls for. Also, I, gulp, used Pillsbury ready-made pie dough. I just didn’t have the time to make and roll out my own. To mix things up a bit, I shredded some sharp cheddar cheese and pressed it into the bottom crust of my pie. (If you have never had sharp cheddar cheese on a slice of apple pie, you haven’t lived! Truly!). After getting that into the oven, I started on my baked beans.

I once made baked beans, years ago, for my friend Eddie, and literally every single time I have seen him since then he has mentioned them–such was their deliciousness. Unforunately, I have no idea what I did with the recipe, so I had to find a new one for my Election Night Party. After looking at Epicurious, I decided upon the Hot and Smoky Baked Beans recipe. My friend KK once told me that the key to successfully use Epicurious recipes is to read the reviews, which often offer tips for revision. I find that to be consistently true, so when I noticed that many reviews for this recipe said the beans weren’t saucy enough, I decided to increase the sauce-to-beans ratio. The recipe really couldn’t be easier, and it was totally delicious. The only thing I would do differently next time (and there will be a next time!), is I would not use the Great Northern beans the recipe calls for. I thought they were too big and tough-skinned for the recipe. I think next time I would use smaller Navy beans, which are more traditional for baked beans, anyway.

We ended up not having a liberal-loving arugula salad, but just a simple mixed greens salad as that was what was available at the store. The Predicate’s corn casserole was amazing. This is an extremely unhealthy dish, and not something you want to eat all the time, but it is so good. It is sort of like a hot dog in that you can only truly enjoy it if you are ignorant to what goes into it. But if you really must know, here is a recipe for it. Sounds gross, but it is magic. The apple pie look beautiful (see below), but ended up having a bit of a funny taste to it, caused, I think, by one of the apples (I used several types) that tasted a little funny–no fault of the recipe, which worked really well.Over all, the patriotic meal was tasty, especially paired with the dry Lambrusco (ok, not American at all!) that we popped to celebrate our candidate’s victory.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Food musings, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.