A Fast, Easy and Cheap Dinner Idea: Cowboy Beans

With a family of five and only one income, frugal meals are something I am very familiar with. With two toddlers and a teen, fast meals are also important to me. This particular recipe is both fast and frugal. It meets all of my basic requirements and is delicious as well. I usually try to keep the ingredients for this meal on hand for those days when a fast meal is a necessity or for when I forget to defrost something!

Cowboy Beans has been one of my favorite dishes to eat since I was a little girl. As I got older and started cooking for my own family, I tweaked my mother's recipe to make it work better for us. This is a fairly economical meal and can be switched up in many different ways to make it spicier, sweeter, more filling or meat free. This is a great meal to make when it is cold or rainy as well as being cheap. I love it as a last minute meal decision as it takes so little time to make. Serve this with corn bread or biscuits and even a small green salad to have a complete meal that almost everybody will love.

To make this dish completely vegetarian, substitute fake ground beef crumbles for the ground beef and use vegetarian Worcestershire (the regular kind has sardines as one of the ingredients). To adjust the flavors, you can add mustard or BBQ sauce to make it tangy. I also like to buy the pre-chopped frozen onion and pepper mixes. They also include some spices and celery. It is an economical choice and gives more flavor.

Cowboy Beans

Ingredients

½ pound of ground beef OR meat substitute (crumbles)

1 small onion, chopped

1 small green pepper, chopped

salt and pepper to taste

Worcestershire sauce

minced garlic

2 large cans of baked beans (I use the Bush's Brown Sugar Beans)

1 small can of Red Kidney Beans, drained

Directions

Sauté your garlic, onion and pepper in a pan with a little butter or oil until the onions are tender. Add the ground beef or meat substitute to the pan and cook until done (or heated through for the substitute). Drain any excess grease from your pan and then add your baked beans and the drained kidney beans. Add a few dashes of Worcestershire to the beans or any other flavorings you choose to use. Salt and pepper to taste (we like a lot of pepper!) and heat through.

Cover the beans and allow to simmer until you are ready to eat them. Stir occasionally to keep them from sticking to the bottom of the pan. Serve in bowls so that the bean juice does not run everywhere. You can use this as a side dish without the meat or as a main dish. This is also a great dish to take to a potluck dinner as it is just enough different from traditional baked beans to get lots of compliments!