"Cooking With Beans" could be Beanie Sigel's biggest hit yet. The Philadelphia-born rapper, whose fifth studio album, This Time, is currently out for mass consumption, has a passion for mastering recipes. With specialties like chicken curry, the hip-hop veteran throws on his chef hat any chance he gets. He's even considered creating a TV series centered on his expertise in the kitchen.

"Me and my friend were thinking of shooting a couple of pilots for a show called 'Cooking With Beans,'" the 38-year-old MC tells The BoomBox. "There's not too much that I can't cook."

Mixing up a variety of beats and lyrical structures is second nature for Beans. However, so is his ability to cook. The "Bad Boy Mack" creator, who is set to begin serving a 24-month prison sentence for tax evasion Sept. 12, perfected his cooking skills by watching his mother at work.

"When you grow up and you're less fortunate, and you be hungry, you be waiting, standing next to the kitchen like, 'Mom, is it ready yet?'" Sigel shares. "She's like, 'Get out of here.' [I was] just watching. Anything I see once I can do. I don't watch a lot of television, but when I do, I watch the Food Network."

Besides serving up homemade treats, Beanie Sigel also finds solace in another artistic medium: painting. The former Roc-a-Fella Records signee once tagged up trains in South Philly as a graffiti artist but left the illegal act to the wayside to focus on drawing and oil painting, legally.

"That was something I was going to do when I stopped doing music," he admits. "I've been doing that since school. I won a lot of awards for paintings. I still do paintings -- a lot of abstract art, stuff like that."

Sigel doesn't boast about his talent; he sincerely believes he has a "knack for it." His wife can even attest to that. The lyricist recalls a meaningful piece he crafted for his lady, one which marked a particularly momentous occasion for the couple.

"I drew a picture of my wife," he remembers fondly. "We were on our honeymoon; we were in Vegas, and she was sitting in the window of our suite and I just started drawing her while she was looking out the window at the Palms Hotel. She still has it."

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