Comfort Foods: Beans and Bread

Okay, I have no good title for this one. It is an homage to Grandma and Grandpa Pratt.

Admittedly, one of the first tests of my marriage was introducing Stef to Grandma Pratt's cooking. Stef barely survived the experience. It's not that Grandma Pratt didn't know how to cook, it's that she wasn't willing to spend any money on ingredients. So if she had leftover piecrust, green beans, and canned beef, well, she'd make it work. Or at least try.

But there was one time they devised something that was truly great out of leftovers:

Grill a slice of homemade bread.
Pour baked beans (from a can, hormel or van camp's work just fine) on top.
Put a slice of fresh tomato on top of that.
Then melt a slice of mozarella cheese on top of that.

After the Whole-Wheat Griddle cakes with Santa Barbara Plum Jam, this has to be my favorite Pratt recipe. The Burnham side is another story - my mom and grandma and great-grandma have 'the gift' with cooking - but the Pratt side produced just two great recipes.

By the way, if anyone manages to perfect a recipe for the griddle cakes(it was made 'off-the-cuff'), be warned of the following:

As I understand chemistry (which is very little at all), when you combine elements, the new compound has properties that are unrelated to the properties of the original elements, e.g. flammable hydrogen plus fire-feeding oxygen = water, an extinguisher. The only exception to this rule is mass: You cannot create mass by combining elements. The mass of the new compound is the sum of the masses of the elements. Properties different. Mass same. There is only one exception to this law:

Pratt Whole-Wheat Griddle Cakes defy all of the laws of chemistry, physics, and gravity. Their atomic weight is greater than gold. If you can eat more than one, and they're good enough to make you want two, you need to be prepared for the fact that you've just swallowed fiber with a density that defies the law of physics - even light can't escape. Astronomers wondered for decades why their black hole studies consistently become erratic at 5:30 AM pacific time. It's because that's when Grandma got back from her morning walk and fired up the griddle and started mixing the Sprite and Buttermilk.