Conquering More Fear Foods and Cooking Bacon

Yesterday I was back to making dinner, which was a little bit of a relief. The food I had eaten at my retreat with friends was good, but I was ready for something a little more healthy. I had also just missed cooking! But that did not mean that I was done with eating fear foods, because I cooked bacon for the first time ever! I made a dish called "Sweet and Sour Bean Trio" from Phyllis Good's cookbook, "Fix-It and Forget-It Lightly" and not only does it call for four pieces of bacon, crumbled up, but for two tablespoons of the bacon drippings! It was hard for me to believe that it was included in a "healthy" cookbook. I had to remind myself that fat is part of healthy eating and that the bacon drippings would be dispersed throughout the whole bean mixture. I served the beans over rice, and man, they were delicious! I will definitely make them again. The beans were mostly sweet, which was fine with me, as you know I have a sweet tooth.

16 oz can kidney beans, drained
1. Turn your crockpot on low and dump in your three cans of beans.
2. Brown the bacon. I don't know how to make them pretty and able to lay flat. If anybody knows how, let me know! Not that it really matters...
3. Crumble the bacon and combine it with 2 T drippings from the bacon, onion, brown sugar, mustard, garlic, salt, and vinegar. If your brown sugar has hardened like mine did, put it in a microwave safe bowl and cover it with two wet paper towels and then cover the top of the bowl with plastic wrap. Microwave it for about a minute and a half and you will have soft brown sugar again!

Beans and rice are perfect for cold days and yesterday was definitely a cold day-for the South, anyway... It's funny, but when I was a kid I hated lima beans, but then again, my mom never made them with crumbled up bacon and brown sugar...