Semi Dogs
Our story begins with two two-pound bags of Great Northern beans. I was helping Spike stock the food pantry she runs, and was loading plastic bags of beans onto the shelf for her to later hand out to her clients. I was hasty and careless (and the bags were kinda low quality). The thumbs of both hands simultaneously sank into bags, puncturing them. Spike couldn't distribute them, but I was reluctant to throw them out, so I went home with four pounds of dried Great Northern beans.
I soaked one bag overnight, and found that they had expanded more than I'd anticipated. Half the beans I made into US Senate Bean Soup from New New Joy, a simple ham-hock flavored stew that is considerably more savory than most senators you're likely to meet.
That left the other pound. I decided to try to make baked beans, which I'd never done before. Being me, I mashed together Joy's two baked bean recipes; used plenty of bacon and molassass; tripled the recipe's allocation of onions, mustard powder, and ginger; and threw in a few chicken jalapeño sausages from TJ's for good measure. Apparently I got so excited by all this that I neglected to include enough water or something, and it took two days of cooking and tinkering before the beans actually got soft enough to be pleasant to eat.
Once that occurred, they were delicious,and I started trying to think of what to do with them. Rummaging around in the fridge, I saw the remaining chicken jalapeño sausage and raw bacon and remembered my trip to Tucson when Andrel took me and Charlotte out for "sammy dogs," an occasional nickname for the glorious and terrifying Sonoran-style hot dog--two dogs wrapped in bacon and grilled, served in one bun with beans, mustard, mayonnaise, cheese, and a somewhat variable bunch of other stuff. It is the nietzchian uber-nosh: beyond good and evil, a force unto itself.
My re-interpretation (code for: "version using what I had in the fridge") of this classic, while far from faithful, had an ad-hoc charm of its own.
I searched around for my cocktail skewers for a couple minutes--to hold the bacon on the sausage--and then realized that plastic wouldn't really be ideal for this task. So I used picture hanging nails.
What? I was hungry!
So. TJ's chicken sausage wrapped in bacon and grilled in the toaster oven, with molassas baked beans (in place of the traditional smoky pintos), mustard, mayo, salsa, and Vermont cheddar; served on, um, onion naan. Which is just good with just about everything.
So, yeah. I'm not ashamed. I'd do it again, man. But I do recommend taking out the nails before you eat.