Sunday dinner

The truth is, the Sunday dinner I made today wasn't too special—something I sort of squeezed in while doing other stuff, and probably nothing to write about. I roasted a traditional chicken (slowly, because Kathleen and Sarah were in Sioux Falls) with Zehnder's seasoning and made some rice pilaf and Dutch green beans for the sides.

The Dutch green beans were something I came across when two of my enthusiasms intersected: I was trying to duplicate the green beans they have at KFC; and I was browsing through old school lunch menus and saw them listed from one dating back to the late 1960s.

That got me scouring the Internet for an appropriate recipe. The one that sounded most like what I wanted turned out to be cafeteria-sized: you START with a No. 10 can of cut green beans, which seems to be something like 6 or 7 pounds of them. I like green beans, but I don't like them THAT much.

Anyway, I scaled it down to just two 15 oz. cans.

The first thing you do is fry up three or four pieces of bacon, nice and crisp.

Those come out of the pan (onto a paper towel) and I toss a Tablespoon (or so) of finely chopped onions into the hot bacon grease and cook until they start to get translucent.

Then in go the two cans of (drained) green beans. I sprinkle those with about a Tablespoon of white vinegar and some salt (you don't need a lot of salt with the bacon) and black pepper (you can be fairly liberal with the pepper).

Stir it all around until the beans are heated all the way through, then crumble the bacon and add that to the mix. Out of the pan and into the serving dish.

You can shortcut this if you're in a hurry:

I keep a container of bacon grease in the fridge (learned that from my dad) that I use to start things, then just add bacon pieces (like Hormel) at the end.

And if I don't have a fresh onion handy, I'll use frozen, but chop it really fine and let the water cook out before I add the beans.

If you don't have the beans—well, in that case you probably should make sometime else.

Next time I'm going to complain about a couple of my favorite liquors changing their traditional bottles. It's not really a recipe, but Mr. Mom likes a drink when cocktail hour rolls around. So there IS a connection.