What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor
December 31st 2008 - Posted in downeast cooking, Food, vegetarian
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I can’t believe I didn’t think to put the two together before. Baked beans are a traditional down east dish that I ate regularly as a kid, and still make a couple of times a year. Served up with real brown bread (bread made with molasses, not whole wheat bread), this is a perfect dish on a cold Saturday night in the winter. Also traditional on a cold winter’s night is a glass of rum, and the flavours here combine really well. I was a little heavy-handed with the rum in my test batch, thus the restrained 2 tablespoons in the ingredients list, but rum lovers can add up to a quarter of a cup. Just be warned that not all the alcohol burns off, so these beans have a bit of a kick to them.
I used Sailor Jerry spiced rum because I have seekrit aspirations to be a hipster, but mostly because that’s what I had on hand. But any decently flavoured spiced rum would do.
I haven’t worn perfume for years. Nothing scented really, if I can help it, unless it’s of the all-natural essential oil variety. Allergies and chemical sensitivity see to it that pretty much anything with fragrance gives me a splitting headache.
There’s a book called The Celestine Prophecy, a novel based on some new age spirituality, mostly rooted in some old spirituality. This post is not about that book, which has a number of detractors, as well as a number of fans, although having read the book, it’s what I tend to think of when coincidences occur.
Like any family, when I was growing up, we had snack foods in our house, but throughout the year, these were pretty basic; (mostly) homemade cookies, chips, ice cream. But at Christmas, the grocery cart would fill with more premium brands. To this day, it doesn’t seem like the holidays to me without certain items; notably a can of Poppycock, a tin of Quality Street chocolates; Coca-Cola; and Bits and Bites. These were the more expensive versions of things we would otherwise buy, but probably because they were more expensive, they only showed up at our house in December. It got me thinking recently as to whether these items were really better than their rest-of-the-year counterparts, or whether the novelty of having them at holiday time simply made them seem better.