Frugal Fast Food

This last Saturday, my husband hosted his monthly poker game.

Yay! I netted (is that a word?) $9.00 for the Camaro Fund.

Anyway, it had been a pretty crazy day, what with looking for land in all the wrong places, and getting the house cleaned up for the game.

So around 8pm I finally got around to eating dinner. This is late for me. I love to eat dinner early.

I wanted something fast, easy, and simple. But tasty of course. These are exactly the circumstances that call for building a meal around beans.

This time around the star of the show was canned baked beans. This is what I did: toasted three slices of homemade wheat bread, buttered it up, poured microwaved beans on top. Added a glass of milk, and some fresh strawberries for dessert. Yummy. To me, this is just about a perfect meal.

It must be weird, though. As I was sitting at my little breakfast nook table eating this delightful concoction, one of my husband’s poker pals came in from smoking outside. He glanced at my dinner with a puzzled look on his face, and said, “What’s that you’re eating?”. Of course I replied, “Baked beans on toast. It’s reallllly good.”

This guy is a native Texan. Probably fifth generation for all I know. He just gave me the funniest look and said, “What is that, some kind of California food?”. Ha, that just cracked me up. I don’t know, maybe it is because I used to eat it a lot in California, too. But I don’t put sprouts and avocados on it. Though I’m sure that would be delicious, too.

The next day, after I told him this, my husband told me that Mr. Texas went upstairs (where the poker action is) and reported to him in a low, confidential voice, “Do you know that your wife is down there eating beans on toast?”. My husband wasn’t sure just exactly how to respond to this scandalous tidbit. It kind of came out of left field.

So, if you’re pressed for time, and hungry, and broke, I can recommend this meal highly. I don’t know if you’ll like it, because maybe it’s more exotic than I thought, but all I can say is I love it. One of these days, I’m going to get around to making my own baked beans and freezing them, which is the cheapest way to go. But considering I can get quite a few spur-of-the-moment meals out of one tasty (not-too-expensive) can of Bush’s Vegetarian Baked Beans, I think that’s a good Frugal way to go, too.

Here they are: one of my favorite frugal fast-food meals. Is California Cuisine about to invade Texas? Cowboys are trembling in their boots, but the cows are leaping for joy.