Beans on Toast - Stretching Meals Lately

Oh, I was SOOOO right about how much time actually having a stove to cook on would give me in the mornings. I got up later than usual, took the dogs out and came back in with less than an hour before his alarm would go off.

On our cheap temporary plug in electric burner, that wouldn't be enough time for eggs and pancakes or toast. And eggs always make such a mess on our old pans, really I think it was mostly the way that burner gets hot then turns itself off and back on.

But today I kicked on my new cast iron griddle/grill(I'm also super duper excited about that, even named her Black Betty and plan on taking her on camping trips. Yes, her theme song will be involved whenever she gets brought out.)
Made extra of everything leaving eggs for last minute so they wouldn't be cold. The past month I've had to accept letting things be cold because of the timing.

Eggs, toast AND hashy browns, even fried up some mushrooms and onions to go on top because I had so much time. Tried waking him up ten minutes early but that was a no go.

I added one of my meatless sausages to test it out on the grill, it got the marks browned on the outside nicely.

It was totally a break feast of celebration for us. YAY!

However that's not actually the breakfast I wanted to write about for today. It's "An English Breakfast" that I planned to get into. If you think having toast AND hashbrowns is excess carbs, then this can get worse, I've seen the pictures of diners over there and the amount of chips on a plate along with toast and other things too.

See around here, nobody I knew does the beans on toast thing. In the 90s as a teenager online, I remember a friend mentioning it as what they were snacking on and a conversation breaking out in our group about it.

I was intrigued and had to give it a try. A perfect easy snack or meal for a vegetarian teen that was quick and could be eaten any time and was very filling? Oh yeah! I loved it. Anybody who saw me with it thought I was weird, I'm used to that.

It wasn't until I happened to be renting a room with my family and brother in law saw me eating one day then said "I never knew you liked an English Breakfast" that I heard of that name for it. He told me lovely stories of regular customers who came in before that he would cook that for.

(posting food pics here should make me start wiping down the counter more often while cooking)
PLEASE DISREGARD THAT ONE SPOT FOR NOW <3

All you really need is to make toast, and heat up some beans. I was taught to melt butter into the beans and mix a little mustard for some reason. Maybe because vegans use mustard in a lot of cheese-like sauces, and some people put a slice of cheddar melted under the beans.

It's an amazing comforting dish, really. Keep it simple stupid, simple is better sometimes right? What you're after is for those fries and crunchy outside bread to soak up the sauce with all their carby goodness, then the beans themselves so soft and creamy. It's a balancing act of perfection. The textures all have to be just so, the correct amount of each. You don't want it to get all soggy and gross of course.

Does that really make it a recipe? The trick is finding the proper beans is the hardest part, it's alleged sacrilege to use say American Pork and Beans or Bush's baked ones... no there's only one brand you're really supposed to use: Heinz. In a blue can.

Now, that's not always what you find or get around here. So I've been known to use other things to get by. My fave is a store brand simply labelled "vegetarian beans" and I think those are close enough for me.

*--quickly ducks behind taller furniture before she gets pummeled with random things being tossed her way-- *

The other day one of the foods we were gifted with was a huge can of beans. At first that huge can sat dominating my counter space for hours as I tried frying up batches of taters(we had just received six more bags on top of the ones from last week, we're buried in them. Not the best for a weight loss diet maybe, but thankfully they're very filling for that end of the month stretch!)

After taking them out of those evil plastic bags to dry out in air(they sweat outside before coming home) I wanted something to store them in that could be moved around all at once. Old egg cartons, I usually collect for sprouting garden seeds, worked out perfect!

Waiting for them to fry, as the cheap burner turned off the heat constantly, took forever. While it did that I also cooked up the last GIANT head of cabbage(seriously ya'll, this thing was bigger than his own head when he brought it in for me) with more potatoes for my husband to take to work for lunch.

I was too busy to look at and deal with this new enormous UFO elephant in the room as it watched me cooking everything else but it for hours.

Though it's pinto instead of small navy ones, I instantly thought I could make this work by cooking half of them down with a sauce.

In my pressure cooker/crockpot(since we still didn't have a stove and that one burner was being used) that I was still currently doing batches of cabbage and potatoes in. It was a long hot night.

The other half of them will be cooked down and spiced as refried beans, which is how a pinto should be treated properly around here. Ya know, with normal folks.. not like me and my blasted English Breakfast idears.

Oddly enough I had written this for last weeks poetry slam challenge that morning, and he brought home this can in the evening. It didn't even DAWN on me until the next morning when I was looking at this huge can on my counter, wondering what to make out of it, and deciding not to get the camera to take a pic: It was just a can of beans after all, boring for people.

Yet it made me so excited! I saw the potential meals, and even the can itself makes me happy because I'm going camping at the end of the month and those work great for campfire cooking use too. Win Win! Food and a recycle project! I've seen so many creative ideas from just making them into pots for boiling stuff, or turning them into portable little rocket stoves.

When I decided against getting the camera, the poem I'd written came into my head and I had a serious moment of shock while laughing assorted body parts off.

Sea of love   you and me   make it   through
through rough   waters and land   yes we can
can of beans   not many things   still meals to be
be all that may   it's a new day   until down we fall

Then I of course DID go grab the camera. That just seemed so crazy a coincidence. When I wrote it I remember not knowing where that line even came from and thinking it seemed weird and out of place, but it sounded ok in my head something told me it for a reason, so I just left it.

A day later it finally made sense and I knew why, now I actually love that poem instead of thinking it was really odd but fun.