I love having the ability to preserve food! It’s very fun to be able to find a way to use any amount of food that comes our way. 🙂 Yesterday I dried a load of yellow summer squash – we were given a box of them when the person who got them realized they were so perishable that they’d go bad before they could use them and didn’t want to wait for that point so they passed them to us; I still have enough to do another half load in the dehydrator. We dried four trays as slices, since the kids like to snack on them, and six trays with chopped pieces, since that’s the way I use it most frequently for cooking. I’ll do the rest of them chopped. It will nice when the winter comes, to add a taste of summer to my dinners. Right before the squash I dried the last of the peas and carrots I had in the freezer, to get them out of the way.
Today we went pear picking and got loads of delicious pears. (Thanks, Alisa! Your kids were a great help and a pleasure to spend time with!) Fruit picking is a wonderful family activity, and I love being able to do it locally and for free rather than driving forty minutes away to pay for the experience. I put a large wooden basket of them in the basement (where it’s cooler) for eating fresh, and will load the dehydrator with some before I go to sleep. Last year when we got a lot of free pears we found that the kids really enjoyed them dried – it’s hard to dry them fast enough to keep up with their ability to eat them! This time I’m not bothering with peeling them or deseeding them – we’ve sliced them thinly and put them on the trays at 135 degrees; they’ll be ready when I wake up in the morning. As they ripen more I’ll probably want to can some, too. Dh liked having them canned, so there’s something for everyone. 🙂
Tomorrow I’m taking the kids to a Hands On History Day at a historical museum. I scheduled my monthly shopping trip to coincide, since the museum is somewhat in the area of where I’ll be going. This museum day is the main reason I haven’t been in eight weeks (I didn’t want to go during the Three Weeks and it didn’t make sense to go right after Tisha B’Av and then to go again now for this trip). After a few hours at the museum, we’ll do some shopping. It will be nice to stock up again, and if I find some good produce bargains I’ll then have more dehydrating in my immediate future!
Avivah
But how do you cook with dried squash? And are the pears just a snack food? I don’t know much about dried vegetables, and their uses.
Linda – I put the squash into anything that calls for it. If it’s a stew, there’s no need to do anything to rehydrate it, as the cooking liquid will do that. If it’s for something like squash quiche, I’d rehydrate the squash by soaking it in hot water before using it, and it would plump back up. I do the same thing with all the dehydrated vegetables – they take up a fraction of the space they use when frozen or fresh, and since they’re already sliced or chopped, it’s convenient to have the equivalent of instant vegetables to cook with.
The dried pears are mostly for a snack. I was talking to the cook at th e tavern at the Hands On History Day about traditional preservation and cooking methods, and he talked about how they would dry fruits to make pies or compotes in the winter, since there was no fresh fruit available out of season. So if I wanted to make something with cooked fruit, I could use the dried fruit.