Food Fail

This past Saturday I really wanted to do something homemade.  Since we're gearing up to move, we haven't had many really good home cooked meals lately.  I saw a cooking show where they made spicy deviled eggs and slow cook "cowboy" beans with canned beans and I thought, sure, let's make baked beans on the stove and deviled eggs.

Instead of "cheating" and using canned beans, I decided to go full homemade and do real beans.  I ran to the grocery to pick up essentials between DS's truck errands (fixing a truck is an all day thing with multiple trips to and fro).  I knew I'd need a pound of navy beans, eggs and an onion.  Everything else I already had in stock at home.

Saturday night, I put the navy beans in a big bowl filled with room temp water to let them soak overnight.

Sunday around 11 the beans had been soaking at least 14 hours, so I swirled them around to check for bad beans and drained them.  There wasn't a single floating bean so I thought they must have been freshly bagged.  I looked at a few "on the stove" baked bean recipes to get the gist of cooking times, which seemed to be generally around 2-3 hours.  I started cooking.

3/4 pound bacon, chopped while partially frozen and rendered
used 2 Tbsp reserved bacon grease to saute 1 medium onion, finely chopped
added the bacon back to the onion 
add 1 12 oz can of tomato sauce
add 3 cans of water (using the tomato sauce can)
add 1 12 oz can light beer
add 4 Tbsp ketchup
add 12 dashes of Worcestershire sauce
add 3 tsp "bar-b-que" seasoning 
add 3 tsp garlic powder (we like the garlic in our house)
1/4 cup brown sugar (my 1/4 cup was heaping since I like them a little sweet)
add the beans and stir

It looked like a thick soup at first so I brought it up to boil and reduced it to a simmer.  I checked back every now and then and stirred it around.  I cooked it until the liquid began to thicken and it had reduced a lot.  It ended up cooking around 4 hours.

I also made deviled eggs toward the end, nothing fancy.  Boiled the eggs, cut up some sweet baby gherkins since I'm obsessed right now and after slicing and separating the eggs, stirred mayonnaise, mustard, the pickles, pepper and a tsp. of pickle juice (I just saw this on the  aforementioned cooking show).  Stirred it all up and....it was egg yolk soup.  

Ok, so the eggs turned out runny but tasted a.ok, so we ate them.

The beans...did not cook all the way!!!!  The flavor was awesome but we could not get over the texture.  Not hard, but way too al dente.  DS and I could not figure out how they were not cooked through since I had soaked them overnight AND cooked them for 4 hours!  I will not be making baked beans from homemade again!

*******EDIT:  I put salt in the beans before cooking, which is a GIGANTIC no-no!!!  That is probably why they were a little too hard for our taste.  Do not put salt in them and they may turn out wonderful.