Food Wednesdays

 Welcome Everyone to Food Wednesdays

    I have always loved cooking and baking in my kitchen, has always been my happy place. In no way am I any sort of chef, but rather just a good home cook where most everything is made from scratch. I have always cooked-baked this way, as I have farm girl roots from my Mom and her Mom. All of us used to have large gardens that we froze-canned-or dried. My Grandma also canned allot of meat too.

   I decided to set up this link up event so friends can gather together and share their love of food too.  So as I have mentioned in the past this is all about the food-no rules just food related posts-you can share a recipe, a cookbook, history of foods, photos, going out to eat at a favorite place anything about food you would like to share.

  This post will be a mix of different things from my kitchen this past week. and I apologize ahead of time for the lack of photos-I need to remember to do a better job of that.

   It's been a rough winter week for this area last week-so I was thinking of comfort foods. I made a big pot of a mixed bean soup one day, that turned out really delicious. 

  I started with a carton of unsalted bone chicken broth then filled the pot half way up with water. I had picked up a mixed bag of soup beans from the Amish store that must have had at least a dozen different beans and lentils. I let that all soak for a couple hours after bringing the pot up to a simmer. I have stopped throwing this water-broth after the soak to keep the nutrients in the soup and not down the drain.     I then put it back on the heat and added handfuls of dried onion and dried soup mix veggies, soup herbs, chives, a little red hot pepper flakes, and black pepper (I don't add any salt when I am cooking) and I remembered that I had sun dried tomatoes and dried mushrooms in my pantry. I bought these awhile back and had not used them yet.

  I soaked a handful of these mushrooms for about an hour, cut off the stems as they were very tough and added to the bean soup along with the soaked water.

   These sundried tomatoes were amazing. I cut them in small pieces, added to the soup, they really swelled up-very tender and delicious but held their shape-thought that was interesting-I loved them and will be using these more often now.  I also added a spicy sausage from the Amish store that I found in my freezer. I cut off the casing-sliced in small chunks, heated through in the skillet and added to the soup pot.

We ended up with a delicious hot soup and I froze the rest to give us 3 meals for later.

   Yesterday I made us a keto cheesecake. I have shared this recipe before, but it is a good one if you are baking without or less sugars  The change I made was to make a crust first-that I slightly baked and then added the cheesecake filling.  This time I overbaked it just a bit-sigh-but this is a really good cheesecake. I use one full fat cream cheese and two of the less fat cream cheese.  My crust was made with a mixture of gluten free crushed graham crackers, ground almond and ground hazelnut, butter, splenda for sweetener Here is a photo of the ingredients.

Below is the keto sweetener I like to use now. This recipe uses confectionary sweetener.

  I have been enjoying hot beverages this week-including hot tea and hot cocoa with marshmallows

I love this large pottery mug, it is handmade. I found a couple of these at a garage sale years ago. These are heavy though

Before I set up the link up for you-views of our lake last week

Now it is your turn  Please link up with the url of your blog post and not the url of your blog site-that way someone that visits later on will be directed right to your Food Wednesday's  post

Also please check back late Wednesdays for any new link ups-thanks