Hawaiian Baked Beans

Who doesn't love pineapple? If my touchy taste-budded roomie Jack can palate something, it has got to be universally loved, akin to pizza; or it must have a massive cult following a la avocado. Needless to say, I back pineapple... hard. I'll gladly take it straight, on pizza or a veggie burger, in cupcake form... pretty much however I can get it. That is exactly why, upon discovering this recipe, the choice had already been made for me. This had to happen.

Plucked straight from the FatFree Vegan website, whose blog I *just* started following (SusanV is amazing!), the recipe can be found here. To anyone who creeps the recipe, I strongly encourage you to peek around the site a bit more, lots of beautiful things! Anyhow, this particular beautiful thing has some of my favorite qualities in a dish; simple and quick (perhaps by now you've caught on to this trend?). The recipe is seriously so short that you could get it tattooed across your knuckles... or you could I suppose you could just memorize it in a very short amount of time, whichever. The four ingredients are very basic so there's a lot of room for creativity and meandering, however I chose not to stray because Faint was hungry "now" and I tend to get distracted quite easily. I did manage to use what are in my opinion some of the best options for the beans, pineapple and onion. Amy's Organic was a no-brainer and since I was already spending a bit extra on the beans I didn't want it to be for naught by dropping something horrid into the rich stuff. Fresh purple onion and organic crushed pineapple was the route. I elected to steal some of my third roommate Kathan's jank unbranded lite-syrup because I have no regular need for such trash and I don't plan on developing any such habit! From there it really was as simple as tossing everything into the casserole dish, stirring apathetically and then pitching it in the oven for a bit.

I'm thoroughly convinced you would have to be COMMITTED to screwing this up in the worst way to even possibly misstep with this recipe. Thankfully my heart really wasn't into blowing dinner that night so it turned out just fine. It was no frills, really, but the subtle pineapple flavor that I experienced every few bites was even better than I imagined. I was actually a bit letdown with how seamlessly the crushed pineapple and finely chopped onion disappeared into the beans. I could have saved some time, effort and money buy just heating up the Amy's straight away if I hadn't gotten the occasional loaded bite. With that in mind, Faint and I decided that the next time we get at this one (which we definitely intend to do once grilling season hits), we'd roll with 2 cups total of pineapple, one crushed and one chunked. Another idea we tossed around was either leaving the purple onion in larger pieces, adding another tablespoon or possibly doing both! On a parting note, isn't my food model a pretty little thing?? =]