What are your best sensory memories? What about it is the part that makes the memory special? Was it the company, that time of your life, or other sensations tied to the tastes, smells, or textures?
One of my favorite treats is Jelly Belly jelly beans, at least, the good flavors. I understand this “good” is different for everyone. For me, it’s pear and peach flavor, along with a few others. When I first bite into a pear Jelly Belly, I am taken to Amish Country in Lancaster County, PA.
I was there with my family as a teen. In an indoor market, one of the stalls allowed you to buy Jelly Belly jelly beans by the pound AND by the flavor. Which means you could pay the exorbitant price of Jelly Bellies, but not end up with any of the gross ones (I’m looking at you, popcorn, root beer, and black licorice). I left with a whole bag of the best ones – fruity ones, some tart ones. Just sweet, chewy goodness. And the weight of the bag shifting in my lap in the car as we drove away.
That stack of books is all the reading I’ve been doing about sex, marriage, and relationships. Some of the titles I’ve already mentioned in other posts. I could wait until I got through the rest of the pile to write about them, but I wanted to feature my top two books from the pile, one on marriage, one on sex.
When we get peppers from our farm share, we get piles and piles of them, sweet, hot, and in between. Since we have little ones, I don’t make food too spicy, and so in the past, the hot peppers were either drying on the windowsill (and still not getting used) or going bad in the crisper drawer.
None of recipes I found were quite what I was looking for, so I combined a few different ideas and came up with this.
When it comes to food, I’ve had to experiment with what things are worth paying more for, and what things are just as good in store brand form.
As it turns out, our family prefers Walmart brand to Oreos.
When it comes to baked beans, 6 out of the 8 people who eat solids in our house prefer name brand baked beans. That didn’t stop me in the past from trying to save a little dough and buy the off brand.
I am a bit of a pantry hoarder (the zombie apocalypse could come at any time). I bought several cans of the off brand at once, and they were really, really terrible. No one wanted to eat it alongside our time tested, made-from-scratch, mac and cheese.
I started googling ways to make canned baked beans taste better.
There are actually a lot of ideas out there. But the truth is, once the beans are made and they are already bad, adding new flavors tends to muddy the waters. So I tried making my own.
