Bean pot fail: in which I make horrible food for a public gathering

I pride myself on my cooking skills.  Periodically we have a get together at the high school at which I teach and I try to make something that will stand out and be more enjoyable than the usual fare of store bought potato salad and sandwich meat.  Last time I made a rum-raisin cake with a molasses glaze and it was incredible.

This time, however, not so great.  Boston Baked Beans which, oddly enough, aren't on my recipe blog over at An Egg Without Salt.  I will have to remedy that. 

I decided to make a half batch, mostly because I only had two cups of Navy beans, but also because a full batch is a lot of beans.  I almost always have leftovers on this and eating beans three or four days in a row does not make for a pleasant atmosphere, even when you live alone.

I put together the ingredients, added a little more salt pork than I would have normally because a) I love salt pork and b) the package of salt pork was a little more than a half recipe called for and I didn't want to have it left over.

I put everything into the bean pot (a useful thing to have if your family is originally from Boston as the beans come out better than in a casserole dish or dutch oven).  I decided to use my full sized pot as the smaller one looked too small at a glance.  (Yes, I have three different sized bean pots; a full, a half, and a single.

I was wrong.  The beans didn't fill up the pot enough to really cook properly.  There was far too much surface area open to the air compared to the mass of beans.   The 5 to 6 hour cook time resulted in very dark browned beans which weren't quite cooked all the way.  Al dente, one might say, which wouldn't have been too bad except for the other two problems, that they tasted sort of burned and that they were super salty because I used the extra salt pork

I walked around being annoying and telling people to feel free to throw away their beans, that I wouldn't be offended and that I thought they were horrible.  I had one person try to defend them, but when I pushed back he admitted that they certainly could have been better.

So, two lessons.  One, use the right sized pot.  Two, if something is that bad, just throw it away and show up at the potluck with nothing.  Or stop at the grocery store and buy a container of potato salad from the deli counter.

And for god's sake, don't buy a bean pot that says "Boston Baked Beans" on the side.  That is the picture that popped up when I did a quick google search but talk about touristy crap ...