The Secret Ingredient Is.....

This morning I got ready to make some baked beans to take to a pot luck event and discovered I was out of both ketchup and BBQ sauce. However, I remembered that a while back the Asian market was running a sale on something called "Banana Sauce". Wikipedia had told me that "Banana ketchup or banana sauce is a popular Philippine fruit ketchup condiment made from mashed banana, sugar, vinegar, and spices".  Being a sucker for new food products, I decided to give it a try, but since we don't use a lot of ketchup around here the bottle was still unopened.  I wondered how the sauce would work in my dish.

As it turns out, it worked just fine.

Banana sauce is sweeter and spicier than conventional ketchup, so I was able to omit some of the ingredients I would usually use in baked beans. To make the dish I used three types of beans (Great Northern, pinto, and black, all cooked from dry and stored in the freezer). I chopped a half of onion, half of a green pepper, and several cloves of garlic, then sauteed the vegetables and dumped them to a large bowl along with the drained beans. Next I added back the Great Northern liquid, plenty of banana sauce, and some salt and pepper, then baked it at 325 degrees for 90 minutes.

At the end of the afternoon there were only a couple of spoonfuls of beans left in the bowl, so I wasn't the only one who enjoyed the dish. Now there's a half bottle of banana sauce in the refrigerator, and next weekend I have another potluck luncheon to go to. There will be no overlapping of attendees, so no one would know if I repeated the dish.  Sounds like a plan to me!

Five years ago today: Choose Me!