Baked Beans with Apples

Baked Beans with Apples - so good!

This post goes out to my nephew Adam who really enjoys these baked beans.

This is another recipe inspired by Mme Benoit. The original is found in her Cooks at Home book, published in 1987. It is a true French Canadian recipe featuring maple syrup and was passed down through five generations of her family. Never one to be bound by tradition, I’ve made some changes: substituting bacon for the original salt pork and brown rice syrup for the maple syrup (because that’s what I had on hand), adding some molasses, and omitting the optional half cup of rum poured over the apples just before serving. Burying the mustard-covered onion in the beans is part of Mme Benoit’s original instruction. And yes, you can eat the onion when the beans are all baked. It’s mushy good by then.

About the pre-cooked beans: I began by using the Short Soak Stove Top Beans method described in an earlier post. If you follow that post, remember to double the amounts to get the measure of pre-cooked beans needed for this recipe and keep the cooking water, because you will use it in this recipe. If you use another method to pre-cook the beans or want to use canned beans instead, you will need 12 cups of pre-cooked beans and you will need to add enough water to just cover the beans.

About the brown rice syrup: Brown rice syrup is about half as sweet as sugar. It’s said to offer some health benefits over some other sweeteners and that’s how it wound up in my pantry. Last year, there was a lot of controversy about arsenic in brown rice syrup. After looking into the brand of brown rice syrup I have been using from Lundberg Family Farms, I am satisfied with the safety of their products. If you are interested, you can check them here. What’s really surprising to me in the whole debate is that neither Canada nor the US set limits on the levels of arsenic in foods. If you are interested in the issue, the University of Guelph Food Safety Network is a good place to start your reading.

About the maple syrup: Of course, good old Canadian maple syrup is authentic, tasty and has health benefits, too, and you can check them out here.

All that being said, whether you use brown rice syrup or maple syrup, I hope you will try making these delicious baked beans with apples. They go great with a cooked ham and a crowd of hungry people. Just ask Adam.

Baked Beans with Apples

Get ready for the bean pot

Preheat oven to 325º F.

4 cups dried navy beans, pre-cooked to make about 12 cups, and the water in which they were cooked (I used my Short Soak Stove Top Beans method)

4 strips of bacon to line pan

½ lb bacon, chopped

1 large onion, peeled and sliced in half

1 tsp dry mustard

1 cup brown rice syrup or maple syrup

Bacon strips to line pan

1 tbsp coarse salt

½ cup molasses

2 to 4 apples, well washed, unpeeled, cored and sliced

1 cup brown sugar

½ cup butter

Line a large, deep baking pan with bacon strips.

Place the pre-cooked beans and their cooking water on top of the bacon strips.

Burying the onions

Mix in the chopped bacon.

Cover the onion halves in dry mustard until all of the mustard sticks to them. Bury the onion halves in the middle of the beans.

Add the syrup and molasses to the beans.

Sprinkle the coarse salt over the beans.

Cover and bake for 3 hours. Remove from oven and stir beans gently. If they are getting dry, slowly add hot water to them.

Cover and return to oven for 1 hour.

Topped with apples, brown sugar and butter

Meanwhile, prepare the apples for the topping and cream together the brown sugar and butter.

Remove beans from oven and uncover. Place the apple slices on top of the beans, as close together as possible. Spread with sugar and butter mixture.

Return to the oven, uncovered, for 1 hour.

Serve some of the apples with each portion of beans.

Makes about 12 to 14 servings.


Printable Recipe for MA's Baked Beans with Apples

Dig into baked beans with apples

A Quick Soak for Dry Beans

Who has time to cook with dried beans?

Apparently, I do. (And maybe you do, too.)

And, why would you want to go through the trouble when you can open a can?

All beans are nutritional goldmines bringing you beneficial dietary fibre, low fat protein, vitamins, minerals and no cholesterol. But cooking your own beans rather than opting for a can gives you a healthy edge because, like any scratch cooking, you’ve got control. Canned beans are high in sodium. Start with dry beans and you’re in charge of how much salt is added. Canned beans can have a shelf life of up to five years and that means they have preservatives added and/or the can has a white plastic lining. That lining may contain Bisphenol A, which may or may not lead to cancer or reproductive problems. Start with dry beans and you don’t have to worry about that – or recycling the can.

Dried beans are economical, too, usually about half the price of canned beans. One pound of dry beans will give you about six cups of cooked beans. You’d need about four 15-ounce cans of beans to get six cups of cooked beans. So even with a good sale on canned beans (which we don’t want anyway, right?) the dried beans will be cheaper.

And one last reason to try cooking beans from scratch … their taste and texture will be better than canned.

There are many ways to take beans from dried to cooked. Search “quick cooking beans” and you can see for yourself the length and breadth of the dried bean debate. The method I’m going to describe is taken primarily from one of my cooking heroines, Mme Jehane Benoit, and is rewritten here to be a little easier to follow. Now the “quick” does not mean “instant.” We’re simply cutting the soaking time. You’ll still need to give yourself a few hours to turn the dehydrated legumes into succulent little morsels.

Once you have transformed the dry beans into cooked beans, you can use them any number of ways: soups, salads, casseroles, maybe even the Baked Beans with Apples I’ll be posting next. You can also freeze the cooked beans for future use.

MA’s Short Soak Stove Top Beans

1 lb (about 2 cups) dried beans – any kind, except split green or yellow peas or black-eyed peas, which should not be soaked and consequently not used for this method (Navy beans are shown in this post.)

8 cups rapidly boiling water

1 tbsp molasses

Pick through the dried beans. The surface of the bean should be smooth, firm, and uniform in size and color. Remove any beans that are broken, blistered looking, wrinkled or shriveled. Take out any tiny stones or dirt. Wash beans in cold water. Remove any floaters, as they will not cook properly.

Place beans in a large pot.

Cover the beans with the boiling water. Add molasses.

Cover and let stand for one hour.

Foam forming on top of beans

Uncover and bring to a rapid boil in the same water for 2 to 3 minutes.

You may get some foam gathering on top of the water as the beans cook. Skim off the foam. You can minimize heavy foaming by adding 2 tbsp of butter or oil to the beans.

Cooked and ready to use

Cover and lower the heat. Simmer for about 1 ½ hours or until the beans are starting to become tender.

IF the beans are going to be used in another dish in which they will cook further, such as baked beans, stop here and add the ingredients needed for the dish, then continue cooking.

IF the beans are going to be used in a dish without further cooking, such as in a salad, keep them simmering until they have reached the firmness/mushiness you prefer.

IF you don’t know how you are going to use the beans, continue simmering until they have reached the firmness/mushiness you want. You can always cut down on the cooking time if they end up in a recipe where they’ll be cooked further.

Either way, cook slowly and test the beans often to see how they’re doing.

Printable Recipe for MA's Short Soak Stove Top Beans

Medivnyk: A Honey of a Cake

Sweet little honey cake drizzled with glaze

A few weeks ago my mom, who is a funny, warm and well-intentioned eighty-one year old, started talking about honey cake and how she’d like to make one on a day when she was feeling up to it. With that, she planted a seed. (I think her intentions may have been a touch calculated that day, but what the heck, I love her and I love to make her things.)

It’s been a long, long time since I have made honey cake, but I knew just the recipe I wanted to use and headed for my recipe box. There I found the batter-spattered card: “Never Fail Medivnyk (Ukrainian Honey Cake).” It’s a Mme Jehane Benoit recipe, originally published in 1970 in The Canadiana Cookbook: A Complete Heritage of Canadian Cooking. The recipe appeared in the Saskatchewan section of the cookbook and actually called for Saskatchewan or Manitoba honey. Luckily, my neighbour is an apiarist so I had real Manitoba honey in my pantry.

Since this was for my mom, I wanted to make a few small cakes that would better suit her needs than one large loaf, bundt or tube cake. I have a Nordic Ware® Multi-Mini Bundt pan that makes six cute, little sculpted bundt cakes. I only tried the pan once and then put it on the shelf. My recollection is that whatever I had baked in it, stuck in the pan and/or the pan was tough to clean. But I could picture how sweet the cake would look made in these pretty shapes and persevered – generously coating every nook and cranny of the pan with butter. (The recipe actually made enough batter to fill the fancy pan plus two four-inch springform pans.) The buttering up paid off. Five of the six cakes turned out great and the sixth only had a few points missing. I’m already thinking about what little cakes I’ll bake next in my mini bundt pan. (Incidentally, if you want to helpful information about cake pan sizes, check out the Joy of Baking.)

For the medivnyk taste test, I fearlessly asked two genuine Ukrainians - our good friends Barb and Larry. They gave the honey cake a thumbs up, and Barb said it reminded her of the honey cakes her mom used to make. Mme Benoit and I are honoured.

I’ve rewritten the original recipe very slightly here to make it a little easier to follow, and I included a Lemon Honey Glaze recipe just in case you’re feeling fancy.

Now get yourself some honey and take some time to create and enjoy this homemade treat. Mme Benoit wrote, “It would keep well one month, well wrapped in transparent paper. Keep it in a cool place. It improves with age.” That’s good to know, but I am sure these little cakes won’t be around that long.

MA's Medivnyk

Ready to make a honey cake

Adding the cooled honey

Preheat oven to 325º F.

1 cup honey

3 cups flour

1 tsp soda

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp cinnamon

¼ tsp salt

½ cup strong coffee, cooled

1 tsp vanilla

grated rind and juice of one orange

2 tbsp butter

1 cup sugar

4 eggs, separated

Generously coat pan(s) with butter or solid shortening. This is especially important if you are using a shaped cake pan. This makes one 12-cup Bundt or tube cake, one large loaf cake, or six to eight smaller cakes.

Bring the honey to a boil and then cool it.

Sift the flour with the soda, baking powder, cinnamon and salt. Do this twice.

Combine coffee with vanilla and the grated rind and juice of the orange.

In a large mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar.

Beginning to fold in egg whites

Add the cooled honey to butter and sugar.

Beat the egg yolks and add to honey/butter mixture.

Alternate adding the dry ingredients and coffee mixture to the egg yolk/honey/butter mixture.

Beat egg whites until stiff and then fold them into the batter.

Pour the batter into prepared pan(s).

Cool on rack

Bake about 45 minutes for loaf pan or single tube pan; about 25 minutes for mini-cake pans. Use cake tester or skewer to test for doneness.

Cool upright in pan for 10 minutes. Unmold and cool on cake rack.

Drizzle with Lemon Honey Glaze, if desired.

Printable Recipe for MA's Medivnyk

MA’s Lemon Honey Glaze

½ cup icing sugar

Ready for the taste test

2 tbsp lemon juice

2 tbsp honey

Mix all ingredients together, pressing out any little lumps of icing sugar.

Drizzle over cakes, quick breads or muffins for some sweet citrus tang.

Printable Recipe for MA's Lemon Honey Glaze

Rustic Beef Stew and Bannock

Rustic Beef Stew and Bannock

This is the kind of food that warms a cold winter day, which is a good thing because where I live we have about five straight months of those. The comfort from a bowl of steamy beef stew and a chunk of bannock is always welcome.

The stew itself is pretty straightforward. I call it rustic because I leave the veggies and meat in rather large pieces. If you want things to stew up a little faster, just dice things up into smaller pieces (not too small because the meat will shrink as it cooks). You may loose a little of the distinctive taste of each ingredient, but you will save some cooking time. You can change out the vegetables to suit your taste, just remember that the softer vegetables like mushrooms and peppers won't need to cook as long as the crunchier ones, unless you like them that way like I do.

A word about the beef .... right now the stores I shop in have some pretty high prices on pre-cut stewing beef. I guess it's due to the convenience of having someone do the chopping for you. If you don't want to pay extra for that, or you don't like the look of meat they've chosen or the size of the dice they've used, check out what beef is on sale. Almost any steak or roast can be cut up to make a stew. And it doesn't have to be a pricey cut, because it's going to cook a long time and be tasty and tender.

And about the dried herbs ... please note that I use the same combination and amount of herbs with the flour to season the meat as I do to flavour the sauce. So you will have to measure out the herb combination twice.

This recipe makes a lot of stew, about 8 good-sized servings. Rather than halfing the recipe, I suggest making it all and freezing what you don't want to eat right away.

Banana Love: Blender Banana Layer Cake with Mocha Butter Icing

Two dense, moist layers with a more-chocolate-than-coffee butter icing

Banana. Even saying it brings comfort. BA NA NA

And no wonder. For most of us it's one of the first foods our moms mashed up and spoon-fed us. It appears on the original fast food list. It smells wonderful when baked into muffins, breads and cakes. It's best friends with chocolate, plays well with cream cheese and peanut butter, and you can't make a banana split without it.

The banana has just one little shortcoming. It can go from beautiful bright yellow to spotty brown to mushy black in a few short days. Or is this only a problem in my fruit bowl?

Luckily, there are a myriad of ways to use those less than yellow bananas. For this recipe, be sure to choose bananas that are ripe. A few brown spots are okay, but if your bananas are too mushy, they won't work as well here. Fear not, more banana recipes will follow to use up these unfortunates.

I found this recipe in an old cookbook by one of my favourite chefs, Madame Jehane Benoit. Mme Benoit was an icon in Canadian cooking for many years. In the cookbook, Madame Benoit Cooks at Home, she shares some recipes from her daughter Monique including one for Blender Banana Cake. This is my version of it. If you don't care for the Mocha Butter Icing, cream cheese frosting is equally delicious.

Oh, yeah, you'll need a blender to make this.

Blender Banana Layer Cake 

Preheat oven to 350° F.

Butter two 9” round layer cake pans.

2 ½ cups flour

1 ¼ tsp baking powder

1 ¼ tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

3 ripe bananas (about 1 ½ cups), sliced

3 large eggs

2/3 cup butter, softened

2/3 cup buttermilk or soured milk*

1 2/3 cups sugar

1 tsp vanilla

Put flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt into a mixing bowl.

Put all the remaining ingredients into the blender. Cover and blend until smooth.

Pour blender mixture over dry ingredients and stir until well mixed.

Fill each pan about half full.

Divide batter into cake pans.

Bake 30 to 35 minutes.

Cool pans on a wire rack.

Test each cake for doneness. Your tester will come out clean when cake is done. 

When cool, assemble and frost. The frosted cake will keep well in the refrigerator for several days. You can also freeze the unfrosted cakes to frost later.

* Soured milk is what to make when you don’t have buttermilk for a recipe. Basically, you take regular milk and add vinegar to it to make it curdle. In this recipe, I used slightly less than 2/3 cup of 1% milk and added about 2 tablespoons of vinegar to it. Voila, soured milk.


Printable Recipe for MA's Blender Banana Cake

Mocha Butter Icing

Icing ingredients with icing sugar divided into two quantities. Yes, that's a sifter in the lower right-hand corner. Sifting is an old-school technique that's worth it when you want a creamy, smooth icing.

½ cup butter, softened

3 cups sifted icing sugar, divided into 2 cups and 1 cup

1/3 cup sifted cocoa

2 tsp vanilla

1 tbsp cream or milk

2 tbsp brewed coffee, the stronger the better

MA’s Tip: Sifting the icing sugar and the cocoa is recommended for a smooth and creamy icing. You can mix this whole recipe up in a Kitchen Aid Stand Mixer if you are lucky enough to have one, but a hand mixer will work well, too.

Mix together cream/milk and brewed coffee and set aside.

Cream butter with 2 cups of icing sugar and cocoa.

Add vanilla and 1 cup of icing sugar to creamed mixture.

Gradually add cream/milk and coffee mixture until icing is smooth and has reached spreading consistency.

This recipe makes enough icing to fill and frost a two-layer cake or a 13” x 9” sheet cake.

Printable Recipe for MA's Mocha Butter Icing

Care to share a bite?