Baked Beans and Baked Eggs

This dish is perfect for those cold, wet, winter weekend days when all you want to do is snuggle on the couch under a blanket and watch old movies.
The recipe is taken from the May 2010 edition of Better Homes and Gardens, with a couple of minor changes. The magazine calls the dish "Baked Eggs" but it's really a bean dish rather than an egg dish. Serves four, enjoy.



Baked Eggs

50ml olive oil
1 onion sliced (we used 2 onions and left out the leek, simply because we didn't have one)
4 garlic cloves, crushed
1 leek sliced
2 teaspoons curry powder
1 tablespoon brown mustard seeds
5 sprigs of thyme
2 x 400g cans cannellini beans, drained and rinsed (we used one can of butter beans and one can of kidney beans instead of cannellini beans)
2 tablespoons tomato paste
2 x 400g crushed tomatoes
3 tablespoons cider vinegar
3 tablespoons raw sugar (we used brown sugar)
1 cup water
Salt and pepper
4 eggs
100ml cream
Toasted ciabatta

We added a little cooked chopped bacon, smoked paprika and parsely to get a little more depth and a stronger, more smokey flavour.

Preheat your oven to 200C. Heat olive oil in a large pan over a medium heat, add onion, garlic and leek and cook for around five minutes or until soft. Add curry powder, mustard seeds and thyme and cook for a further two minutes.
Add the beans, tomato paste, canned tomatoes, vinegar, sugar and water (and the bacon, paprika and parsely) then simmer for 40 minutes until reduced by about a quarter.
Spoon the mixture into four oven proof bowls, make a well in the centre and crack an egg in each. Spoon over a little cream and season with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Bake for around five minutes until the egg is just cooked. Serve with toasted ciabatta.