Beans 2 Ways or Ingredient Obsession

During the school year, I am busier than I want to be, and it seems like in the summer there is always something going on that trumps the household stuff. But this year, I am making an effort to live in my house and cook in my kitchen.

I'm also on a frugality/nutrition/novelty/planning-ahead kick. All these forces have combined to make me a dried bean nut! It started out with some obsessive pinning to my food experiments board on Pinterest. And then came the reading about the bean-soaking controversy that apparently rages...somewhere.

In the end, I soaked a pound and a half of black beans, thinking I would throw them all in the slow cooker and make black refried beans like these to fill my tummy and my freezer. But then those beans, when soaked, FILLED a three-quart pot, so I had to expand my horizons. I put about 3 cups of them in the slow cooker in that freakishly simple recipe from 100 Days of Real Food.

Then I took the remaining cup and a half, simmered them on the stove, and started thinking baked beans.

I have only made baked beans once before, so I had about 7 browser tabs open while I compared techniques, recipes and traditions. I referred mostly to these:
-Boston Baked Beans from allrecipes.com
-Baked Beans from Scratch from Delightful Repast

I ended up with:

1/2 pound of bacon, roughly chopped and cooked until it renders some delicious fat, with the rationale that my cast iron skillet can always use a little more seasoning
1 onion, slivered and sauteed in the rendered bacon fat
1 1/2 cup black beans, simmered for about an hour in 6 cups of water

Sauce:
1/2 cup ketchup
2 or 3 TBSP spicy brown mustard
1 TBSP Worcestershire
1/2 tsp black pepper, fresh ground
1 tsp salt
3 TBSP brown sugar

I put the sauce ingredients in a saucepan like I was going to cook them, which I did once before, and then I decided they were going to be in the oven for hours and hours and that was really overkill, so I just scraped them over the beans.

Here's what went wrong:
The beans split while they were simmering, maybe because I cooked them in cold water and it took them so long to get up to a boil so I could simmer them.
I was out of brown sugar and I never have molasses in the house, so I had to wait for my brother, who was on his way over, to finish the sauce.
I don't have a casserole with a lid, so I had to cover the beans with foil.
It was 90 damned degrees out and I was slaving over a hot stove.

Then I got started thinking about what I was going to do with all these baked beans, so I threw together a loaf of no-knead bread to bake on Sunday morning. The beans smell amazing, carmelized and bacony. I can't wait until they happen to my face.

Update: I had them for breakfast with tea and toast Sunday morning. They were a little too rich and sweet, because there were not quite enough beans for the amount of bacon and sugar. I probably could have drained the bacon a little better, too. When I defrost the rest, I plan to serve them with something very simple, like a (not sweet) cornbread, or some slow-cooker roasted pork or beef.

Did I mention none of this wasn't even for dinner tonight? For dinner we had what started out as this Beef Taco Bake, with many modifications. We will have to chat about that later.