Brown Sugar Baked Beans (with a Bite!) recipe

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Capone in the snow…Snocapone

Inwhich I remember–in the dead of winter–how much fun it is to can stuff.

Isn’t it funny... the way we tend to get into activities during certain months of the year that we don’t give much of a thought to during other months. (And what I mean–at this time–by ‘get into’ is to become radically obsessed with.)

To wit.

I haven’t canned anything but tomatoes (and this is how I do it)  and salsa (this is my salsa recipe that ruined everything) and a few jars of fruit jam (like this one) for years and years. After all: when tomatoes and fruit are fresh and available, (and since I’m growing them myself) I’m usually crazed with happiness over it being summertime, or fall, and I fall into bed pretty quickly after I come in for a day’s session of gardening, playing with the kids/grandies, and/or doing other outdoors activities.

It’s not a good time of year for me to do anything else but grow things. Canning? What’s that?

But eventually, winter does come. Every year, without fail. And I have to face my neglected interior environs.

Hey, that could be a cool name for a rock band: Come see The Neglected Interior Environs! Er, maybe not.

Frankly, gentle reader, this facing the interior of my home is a must. Eventually I must bat down the cobwebs, clean out drawers and closets, and swab out the ‘fridge. I’m not kidding; I don’t do this stuff regularly enough during the warm months, but that’s okay because I’m the only one around here who cares! (Win/win!)

Here’s little Mack himself, climbing out of the pond after a swim.                           Wondering, naturally, what Mom is planning for dinner. (image credit to Wikipedia)

This winter…

however, faced with two large freezers full of food (which makes me very happy, but hey, there’s a point) and only the three of us eating regularly out of them (although one of us is roughly the size of an adolescent moose, see photo above), I decided that a good way to deal with my absurd food-hoarding tendencies would be to unpack those freezers and see how much of what’s in there is still good enough to actually preserve into jars.

(Then I’ll be free to fill the freezers again, once we are back into the food-growing and foraging months *cue shivers of delightful anticipation*.

And that, gentle reader, is how I fell into Canuary.

Have you stumbled across anybody on social media participating in Canuary? I don’t know how long it has been a thing, I just know that it is one now and I’m here for it. The idea is that you can (i.e., preserve in jars, so it’s called CANNING, of course) something every day of January.

January daily canning = Canuary! (Clever little bit of wordsmithing, I think.)

I’m not making every day a canning day (I would like to!) because I’m still splitting dahlia tubers, and producing and directing our annual melodrama. But I’m giving it my best shot!

So far, I’ve canned, er, jarred up:

• Cranberry juice
• Cranberry sweet tea
• Christmas jam (technically I did that in December)
• Beef stew
• Brown sugar Baked beans
• Squash cubes (to use in “pumpkin” muffins and pie)
• Chicken and veg soup
• Beef bone broth

Today I’m sharing my recipe for Brown Sugar Baked Beans

…with a Bite, because I like to add a bit of spice whenever I can.

Here’s the point where I reveal a full disclosure

…what else would you expect from me?: I made this recipe because a. I have a 5-gallon bucket full of dried navy beans in my basement, and b. the last couple of times I bought cans of baked beans, I didn’t like some of the ingredients (high fructose corn syrup, caramel color) and I wondered if I could make better ones.

Then I made hot dogs for dinner one night (we call them tube steaks) and I cracked open a jar of these beans. I didn’t mention that I made them, and canned them myself. (Mack is not usually very enthusiastic about new things.) He basically would prefer steak and potatoes for dinner every night. EVERY NIGHT OF THE WEEK. But now and then you need to balance things out by eating hot dogs and baked beans, right? Adversity is good for you. Not to mention the budget.

He loved these beans that I canned, and I was so delighted by this! I knew that if he looked down his nose at them because they were different from the baked beans we usually eat, that I was looking at consuming an entire canner full of jars of baked beans, myself. Well, Bryan probably would have joined me.

and Finally

because I know that you like value-added products, and blog posts:

….a few links for those of you who want to do more canning while it’s too cold outside to do really important stuff, such as grow things. Hehehe.

• This is my go-to book on canning and preserving.
• This gal on Instagram is the young lady who ignited my interest in Canuary. She shares dozens of recipes and she’s really worth a follow! She and I are kindred spirits, though we are at least one generation apart in age.
• This young lady on Instagram is so great at using food scraps to make new things, and canning everything, as well.
• This gal on Youtube I wish I had margin in my life to watch educational videos, but I don’t. But I have taken the time to watch several of hers. She’s also an enthusiastic participant in Canuary, and is a little more thorough in her explanations than most.

Hey you, thank you for reading to the very end of this post! I see that I don’t have any photos to add to it, but I’m going to have to do that later. Now it’s time for me to push PUBLISH.

Ta ta for now!

• ← What’s Going on Around Here, Anyway? volume 1-25