I love beans...any sort...but my all time favourites are borlotti beans cooked with smoked ham..tomato and garlic sauce...and a crusty french loaf...yums!
Mine are much the same, Lee. I might add bacon or ground beef at times. The cheapest pork and beans do fine and turn out better than those expensive ready to eat canned baked beans.
We don't make baked beans, but my chef....hubby...uses beans/legumes a lot in veggie chili and veggie curry. Kidney beans, black eyes peas, chickpeas, butterbeans, etc. We buy them dried and he cooks them first in the pressure cooker.
I cheat on the baked beans, too. When I really want to make something extra, I used canned baked beans (always Bush's) and add onions, green peppers, cubed ham and pineapple chunks. Throw in some extra ketchup, spicy mustard and brown sugar and you have some major yum-yums.
I think that the more often you eat beans and lentils and such, the less problems you have. Maybe it takes a certain sort of gut flora (or is that gut fauna ?) to deal with all that fibre? Could that explain the average persons difficulties with beans do you think?