baked beans * how to prepare green bell pepper

Janice’s Baked Beans

1 32-oz can pork and beans, drained

1 small onion, chopped

½ medium bell pepper, chopped

½ c. brown sugar

½ lb. pork sausage, browned and drained

4 strips bacon

Put everything except the bacon into a baking dish and mix well. Lay bacon over top. Bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour. You can double this recipe.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make my aunt Janice’s baked beans recipe!

It’s an easy recipe to make and it’s absolutely delicious. My aunt made it for the Fourth of July and I asked her about it. It’s a funny story, so I recorded her telling it.

To make Janice’s baked beans recipe, all you need is a pan big enough to hold everything. You can mix the ingredients directly in the pan.

First, though, you need to get all your ingredients ready. The very first thing you do is brown and drain the pork sausage the same way we learned to brown and drain hamburger meat in the lasagna roll-ups episode. Then turn the oven on. Then dice the onion the way we learned in the carrots episode, and pack the brown sugar into the measuring cup firmly the way we learned in the chocolate chip cookies episode.

The only aspect of this recipe we haven’t covered before is how to chop up a bell pepper. This is about as easy as it can be.

If you’ve ever looked at the bell peppers for sale at the store and wondered what the difference is between green, yellow, orange, and red bell peppers, they’re all the same thing. Green bell peppers are picked before they fully ripen. Yellow, orange, and red bell peppers are of varying stages of ripeness. Bell peppers don’t contain any capsaicin, which is what makes other peppers hot, so you can use the brightest red bell pepper you can find in a recipe and it’ll be perfectly mild. The flavor is a little different, with green bell pepper being a much more definite flavor and the yellow, orange, or red bell peppers being mellower. The brightly colored bell peppers are mostly used to give a dish extra color.

Bell peppers are easy to prepare. You’ll need a paring knife and a cutting board if you have one. If you plan to use every scrap of pepper, cut around the stem and discard it, and you can use the rest. Otherwise, just roughly cut the pepper into slices, then cut those slices into pieces.

The inside of a bell pepper is mostly empty. There are a lot of small seeds, though, which you should discard. They’re easy to remove, though. You can cut up and use the ribs inside the pepper or trim them off and only use the outer shell of the pepper. It all tastes the same but the outside is a shinier green that looks nicer.

Once your bell pepper is cut up into pieces, it’s ready to use. Easy peasy.

So you’ve got the ground pork browned and drained, the onion and bell pepper chopped up, and the brown sugar measured out and ready. Open the can of pork and beans and drain it. Then pour the beans into your pan, add the pork, onion, bell pepper, and brown sugar, and mix it all up really well. In the recording of Janice, the sounds you hear in the background are her stirring the mixture. She uses a heavy oven-safe pot to make it. She also doubles the recipe.

Once you have it all mixed up, lay four strips of raw bacon across the top. It will cook in the oven and add its delicious grease and flavor to the dish as it does. Make sure to lay the bacon strips side by side, not overlapping. If they’re too long to fit into the pan without overlapping, cut them short. If the bacon is especially fatty, trim off the fatty ends and discard them. That way you can pretend that you’re making the recipe healthier.

Put the pan in the oven and set the timer for one hour.