Student recipes: Three easy meals with a Tin of Baked Beans

Baked beans are a student staple and here are three unique recipes to get the most out of the cheap grub.

There are times when most students will roll their eyes and sigh at the thought of ‘baked beans of toast again’, but with a little creative thinking you can transform your humble tin of beans into something more appetising.

Next time you experience ‘baked bean boredom’ try one of these tasty ways to use them.

talking beans

Curried Bean Soup

What you’ll need:

1 tin baked beans in tomato sauce
1 small onion, peeled and chopped
25g butter
1 teaspoon tomato puree
½ to 1 teaspoon curry powder (you can vary this to suit your own taste)
120ml water

Fry the onion in the butter until soft but not brown. Add the curry powder and gently fry for one minute to release the oils in the spices. Add the tinned baked beans and water, stir well and bring to the boil. Simmer for 5 minutes and serve with crusty bread and butter.

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Chilli Cheese Beans on Toast

This is a quick and simple way to liven up baked beans on toast. Empty the beans into a small saucepan and add ½ to one teaspoon of chilli powder depending on your particular tastes – if you like it hot, add more.

Heat the chilli beans up and just before you are ready to serve, sprinkle over a small handful of grated cheddar cheese.

Quickly stir the cheese through just enough to incorporate, pour over hot buttered toast. The cheese will melt and become gooey in between the beans without mixing with the tomato sauce.

Beany Mash

Here is a great replacement for mashed potatoes when you either don’t have any potatoes, or you don’t have the time to peel and boil some.

Open the tinned bean and empty into a sieve. If you don’t have a sieve, leave the bean in the tin and push the tin lid back down to enable you to rinse the beans in the tin without them escaping.

Rinse the beans until all the tomato sauce has gone and the water runs clear.

Melt a little butter in a small saucepan and add the beans. Heat over a low heat to warm the beans through for a minute or two – you don’t want to fry them. Add plenty of salt and ground black pepper. Remove from the heat and mash the beans well with either a potato masher or the back of a fork until smooth.

Use instead of mashed potatoes as a side dish, or use to top a small home-made fish pie or cottage pie. You can also mix bean mash with regular potato mash if you are running short of potatoes and want to extend the amount of mash you have.

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