12W12S11: Faked Beans

You know how sometimes in your darkest hour, when you didn't have a chance to go grocery shopping over the weekend and you don't really have two nickels to rub together anyway so you're eating out of the cupboard and the freezer until payday, sometimes you whip up something out of random ingredients and it turns out to be pretty darned tasty?

Yeah, me neither.

No, I'm kidding: I made up this sort-of BBQ beans dish out of stuff I found in the pantry, the freezer, and the cooler full of dry goods that I never fully unpacked from our beach vacation last year. And it's really pretty good. So here is the recipe:

Faked Beans
Makes about 4 cups

• 2 cans (15½ ounces each) cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
• ½ can Manwich sauce (about 1 cup)
• ½ cup barbecue sauce
• 2 tablespoons Heinz 57 sauce
• ½ pound Jenny-O turkey kielbasa, cut into chunks

Combine all ingredients in a crock pot and stir to combine well. Cook at high heat for 1 hour, stirring only as needed. Reduce heat to low and cook for an additional 1½-2 hours or until done, stirring only as needed. Add additional Heinz 57, ketcup, or barbecue sauce if needed. Reduce heat to warm and continue cooking until ready serve, or remove from heat, cover, and refrigerate over night. If necessary, reheat before serving.

Adjustments: Obviously this recipe can be doubled, since all my measurements are based on halves. I guess you can use any kind of beans you want. I used cannellini beans because they're light in color and pretty plain in flavor and I had about 5 cans of them in the cupboard. You can use any kind of barbecue sauce you like (our was store-brand brown sugar), or make your own. I don't know whether the Heinz 57 makes a difference, but I used it so I included it in my recipe. You could use ketchup or extra BBQ sauce instead. I used turkey kielbasa because we had it but you could use any kind of kielbasa here (or maybe even chorizo or andouille sausage, and definitely hot dogs would work).

My math is fuzzy because I didn't measure everything exactly, but this makes about 4 cups of the finished product. I counted 1⅓ cups as a serving, and there are about 350-400 calories per serving using this recipe. Using lower-sugar BBQ sauce, lower-fat kielbasa, and smaller quantities of everything can reduce the calorie count if you need to. Enjoy!

PS -- I called these "Faked Beans" because they aren't baked (even though most of the baked beans I eat aren't either) and also because I "faked" this recipe out of cupboard ingredients.