I posted about dehydrating zucchini and mentioned that they got quickly eaten up as chips.  I didn’t initially make them with the intent that they’d be used for a snack, and I don’t want to leave you with the assumption that it’s all they are good for!

Here are some other ways you can use dehydrated zucchini slices – they are good in soups, stews, or tomato sauce.  I’ve seen it suggested to dust them with cinnamon sugar, and they then taste like apple chips (slice them 1/4 inch thick, peel them and take out seeds to make this).   Even when eaten plain, they have a sweet-ish flavor, as the natural sweetness is concentrated by the dehydrating process.

 When sliced length-wise, they can be used in place of lasagna noodles when making lasagna, or to replace the eggplant in eggplant parmesan.  You can rehydrate them before using for the lasagna or parmesan, but I’d find them easier to handle by using them dried and then adding extra liquid to the recipe so they’d rehydrate when cooking.

If they are shredded before dehydrating, you can use them in muffins or quick breads – just add a little extra liquid to the recipe you’re making.

Like other dried vegetables, they can be dried and then whizzed in the blender to make a powder.  If you do this, you can easily add a nice flavor to your soups or stews, along with great nutrition, without any signs of vegetables (for kids who are averse to eating veggies).

I’d bet that you could candy them, but that’s just a guess – it’s the kind of thing you could play with by coating them with honey before drying them, and seeing what happened.  Because zucchini has a bland flavor, it can be used in a lot more ways than something with a much stronger flavor.

Avivah

When I last went shopping, I got a huge amount of frozen vegetables.  One of the things I ordered for the first time was frozen diced carrots, and when I got there to pick up my order, the woman in charge of the frozen section told me that I was in luck, since the manager told her to mark the frozen carrots down fifty percent that morning.  And even though I placed my order the week before, that applied to my carrots, too.

That made the diced frozen carrots 25 cents a pound, which is very, very cheap, especially considering that the peeling and chopping has been done for you.  When I saw them marked down, my first instinct was to buy a bunch more than the case of 24 pounds that I already had ordered. But my rational brain took over after taking a second look at the industrial sized cart she had wheeled my order out on, and I wondered what I could possibly do with more, since as it was I didn’t have room in the freezer for everything.  I briefly considered canning them, but I prefer not to can vegetables and knew that I would be creating a lot of time pressure for myself if I had to can everything before it defrosted.  So I reluctantly stuck with just 24 pounds.

Then later that night, eight hours later to be precise, it occurred to me that I could have bought them and then dehydrated them.  I felt like smacking my forehead when this occurred to me, but there was no way I was driving two hours in each direction just to go buy some more!  I had never tried it before, which is why it didn’t occur to me in the store. 

I was very lucky in that the weather has been so cold that nature has been keeping several cases of veggies frozen for me, so I didn’t have to rush to deal with them. But I can’t rely on it staying this cold forever, so I decided yesterday would be a good day to dehydrate some.  My dd8 and I did this together – it was pretty easy since there wasn’t much prep work, just separating the pieces that froze together after she took the bags out to defrost and spreading them evenly on the trays.  We took out three bags of 4 lb. each, and that was one load in the dehydrator.  It took most of the day (I’m estimating about twelve hours, though I wasn’t watching the clock), since there was so much moisture from the ice that had to melt first – I turned it off before I went to sleep and the last of them were finished by then.  It always amazes me how compact everything becomes once it’s dehydrated.

Today, I plan to do another load, since there’s no advantage to keeping them frozen over having them dehydrated.  In fact, the opposite is true – they will take up lots less space when dried and free up freezer space for something else.  Since I plan to use them in stews, chili, pot pies, etc., they’ll be rehydrated as a natural part of cooking and dehydrated works just as effectively as frozen for my purposes.

Avivah

This past autumn, I shared with you about the wonderful free fruit that we picked and preserved.  When I started canning fruit, I stuck to the basics: fruit of one kind in it’s juice, and applesauce.  But there were so many appealing looking recipes to try that I finally succumbed, wanting pantry shelves filled with all of those beautiful looking jars, and made a number of interesting looking things.

Well, it’s several months later, and I can say that was a mistake.  We really like just plain fruit – not chutneys or pickled fruit.  Plain boring applesauce, compote, or stewed fruit.  We have hardly touched any of the other stuff.  I hate all the work that went into it being wasted, but I don’t want to compound the situation by wasting the food and not eating it, too.  And the jars are taking up space that could be taken up with something useful.  So yesterday it occurred to me that we could try to dehydrate the many quarts of pickled apples and pickled pears, and see how that turned out. 

My son did this today, and so far, the jury is still out on how they like the dehydrated pickled fruit slices.  Only three kids so far have tasted it, and two think it’s great, one thinks it’s terrible.  I tasted it and thought they were fine – different from the plain dried apples and pears we preserved, but still tasty.  The consistency is more chewy (the others were crispy), but fine.  They would probably also be good in some kind of pie or cooked, if I wanted to do that, but I probably wouldn’t.  It’s the keeping things simple thing, again.  🙂  

One immediate advantage is that dehydrated fruit takes a lot less space than all of those full jars – I didn’t count how many jars there were that are now empty (17 or so??), but however much it was, it will all fit into two quart sized jars by the time it’s all dried. 

Edited to add: my son discovered that when blended up, the pickled fruit makes fantastic fruit leathers!  Now I don’t feel all that time and effort was wasted, since everyone is enjoying these so much!

Avivah

These past several days, a couple of my boys have been motivated to make fruit leather and dried fruit.  Since we got the dehydrator, dehydrating has been the hobby of my oldest son, but this week, my 9.5 year old got involved as well.  He was feeling like doing something one afternoon, and asked if I would mind if he dehydrated apple slices.

Mind?!?  No, not at all.  I love when my kids do the work and think that I’m such a nice mother for letting them do it.  It’s a good strategy, don’t you think?  🙂  I actually needed bananas dried more than apples, but he wanted to do apples, so I agreed.  These apples are such an amazing snack when they’re dried (they’re the Honey Crisps I told you about before) – they become apple chips, with a very concentrated flavor. 

He also did a few trays of banana chips at the same time – they come out with a leathery consistency.  Also very tasty, but hard to compete with the apple chips. 

My ds15 is the fruit leather expert around here. This week I had about a case of bananas that I bought a couple of weeks ago that was getting very ripe.  We discovered the first time he made fruit leather that bananas are an important ingredient.  It adds a thickness to the texture, and a natural sweetness that goes well with other flavors.  I suppose you could use other things, too, but when he made plain plum fruit leathers, the consistency wasn’t smooth and they cracked.  So to use up the bananas before they went bad, he made plain banana, banana-orange, and banana-orange-apple fruit leathers.  He’s found a nice way to package them – he puts them between two pieces of parchment paper, cuts them into equal size pieces with a scissor, and then stacks them together before bagging them. 

Last night I asked him if he would be able to whip up another batch before he went to sleep, so we could get the last of the bananas out of the way before Shabbos (they need  about 15 hours to dehydrate, so we turn the dehydrator on before we got to sleep).  Even though it was late and he was planning to go to bed, he agreed – he’s such a good kid.  He knows that he could say no to something like this.  There are times I tell my kids to do things, and I expect it done without complaints or argument, but then there are times that I ask them, and that means that a yes or no is equally fine.  He whizzed up a bunch of bananas and some apple in the food processor, so it was pretty quick, especially for him since he’s got the process down.  We didn’t have this processor when he made the first batches a few weeks ago, so this definitely makes the mashing and preparing process faster and simpler. 

Oh – to do this, we spread the fruit mixture on special paraflex sheets that we purchased when we bought the dehydrator. I think you could probably fit pieces of parchment paper over the regular dehydrator rack and it would work fine, but I haven’t tried it so I can’t vouch for how comparable the results are to the paraflex sheets.

Avivah

Last week, I finally turned my attention to the herbs that were still waiting to be harvested from my garden.  Honestly, I am such an irresponsible gardener – I plant things like herbs with no plan how to use them, no idea when to harvest them, and just let them sit there for weeks.  After doing some reading on herbal healing these last couple of weeks, I was inspired to pick them, since I realized that unbeknownst to me, I had medicinal herbs growing right in my garden all this time!  It’s so true what Hippocrates said, about, “Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food” – particularly with herbs, they are one and the same.  I got them picked just in time – later that night, we had our first snow.

All you really have to do to dry herbs is tie them together loosely and hang them upside down, but with eight kids home all day, I have enough visual clutter I’m constantly trying to keep at bay without having little bundles all around my kitchen, dropping little pieces all over my floor and counter!  Since I now that I have a dehydrator, I have a neater solution!

The Excalibur dehydrators come with a setting for drying herbs, and after instructing the child picking the herbs to be very careful to keep them all separate, I asked another child to rinse them off and put them in the dehydrator.  Sometimes I kick myself for forgetting to give a child a reminder that would have saved time and aggravation, and the next day was one of those days.  Because I neglected to mention to the child putting the herbs in the dehydrator that each kind should go on its own shelf – it seemed self explanatory to me, but that’s because I’m an adult.  🙂

So when I removed everything from the dehydrator, I saw four or five kinds of green leafy herbs mixed together on the trays.  Do you know how similar herbs look when they’re dried to the untrained (read: my) eyes?!  Anyway, we sorted them through as best as we could, leaving all of those that we couldn’t figure out in a pile, and after crushing that pile, called it Italian herb blend.  🙂

It wasn’t a huge amount of spices, but it’s nice to have our own organically grown parsley, basil, thyme, oregano, and sage on hand!

Avivah

Last week I made a big decision, one that I’ve been thinking about for a few months, and couldn’t justify doing.  I purchased a new dehydrator, an Excalibur.

I mentioned that I had a small dehydrator that my mom had left behind for us, right?  Well, a month or two ago, I went down the basement and discovered that someone had apparently stepped on it (!) since the trays were all broken.  Please don’t ask how it’s possible for someone to step on a dehydrator without noticing what they’re doing, or why it was on the floor instead of where it was supposed to be.  That’s the kind of question that comes up very often here, and to keep my sanity I’ve tried to accept a certain amount of collateral damage is an inevitable part of living with children.  🙂

Anyway, as long as we had that dehydrator, even though it wasn’t very good, I couldn’t get something else, because that would be wasteful.  And if I was going to buy something, I wanted it to be top quality and large enough to handle the capacities that a family our size demands, and that meant the Excalibur, which meant $$$.  I’ve spent plenty these last few months on my other projects that I didn’t feel it was right to spend on a luxury that I could do fine without.

But then I found out about these dehydrators – they are being sold direct from the manufacturer, but are only $149.95, including shipping.  It’s the largest size they have (not including the commercial ones), with nine trays.  I got mine on ebay, and that listing expired, but here’s a link that will be current for a couple of days: http://cgi.ebay.com/Limited-Offer-Excalibur-2900-3900-R-FREE-Shipping_W0QQitemZ120322998919QQcmdZViewItem?hash=item120322998919&_trksid=p3911.c0.m14&_trkparms=72%3A1421%7C66%3A2%7C65%3A12%7C39%3A1%7C240%3A1308.  They are unused, but for whatever reason were returned to the manufacturer (eg, store display, wrong size ordered, etc).  They are thoroughly checked over to be sure that everything works as it should, and come with a ten year warranty – if you buy a new one direct from the manufacturer, you get a three year warranty.  So it’s a lot cheaper with a much longer warranty!

I also ordered three Paraflex sheets, to use for making fruit leathers.  I’ve so often seen ripe bananas and other fruits that I’ve passed on because I couldn’t use it all up fast enough, and I thought that having an option to turn them into fruit leather would be nice.

It arrived yesterday, and right away everyone was commenting on the obvious difference in quality and size.  I decided to inaugurate it today with sweet potatoes since I had about twenty pounds around and some were starting to get soft spots (and I’m going to be doing a big shopping trip very soon and buying more).  We cut away the soft spots, put them in a pot to steam lightly (they ended up getting more than lightly steamed, but as I said before, letting go of rigid expectations of how and what everyone does things is a big part of a pleasant home atmosphere), sliced them, and then put them in the dehydrator.  They’re still going right now – the kids were commenting about how much faster they seem to be drying – with the old dehydrator, it took over 24 hours and we had to rotate the trays, and still the tray on the bottom was too crispy and the top one not dried enough!

I’m amazed that only 4.5 of the nine trays were filled – it really has a large capacity!  I’ll turn it off before I go to sleep tonight, and once they cool off, I’m sure they’ll take up a lot less space than they were before!

Avivah

Today we successfully my latest experiment – dehydrated bananas!  I often see bananas at a significantly reduced price, but they are usually at the perfect stage to eat.  When I buy a large amount, it means that either I have to get busy baking or everyone gets busy eating!

I’ve often wondered if dehydrating bananas would be a feasible option to take advantage of the cheap prices when I find them, and yesterday decided to stop wondering. 🙂  I sliced them lengthwise instead of in little circles, because it was quicker for me, slicing each banana into four slices.  I put them (maybe 10 or 12 bananas, didn’t count) into the electric dehydrator and let it run until they were finished.

I was very pleasantly surprised today by the results – they were delicious!  Some were a little too crunchy, and we all agreed we like them slightly leathery best.  They make a great snack, and are very compact, so it would be easy to pack them away into glass jars to keep them fresh in the pantry (if I could keep my kids away from them!). 

My only problem with this is that it seems like a lot of electricity is used to dry fruits when using an electric dehydrator.  So today I did some research on how to build a solar dehydrator.  I’m quite interested in making one, but decided that first we should build a solar oven that’s suitable for cooking with.  I like the idea of having a cooking source that is free, dependable, and not dependent on supply and demand, as a backup to my gas stove and electric oven.  Several years ago we made one as a family project and it wasn’t successful. This time there are a couple of things I would do differently, and one is to make it out of wood instead of cardboard just for the sturdiness factor.

I got some wood from the work crew doing demolition down the block – the guy was happy to give it to me, saying that it saved him from having to take it to the dump,  and even offered to carry it home for me, but I told him I could manage it fine. They had lots of wood but I was only looking for something light and in good condition.  I don’t know if it’s enough wood for the entire oven, but it’s a start.  Then I happened to bump into the new owner of the home that is doing extensive renovations, who told me about all the work they’re doing.  She mentioned that they’re getting rid of two newish windows because they’re replacing all of them, and I asked if I could have one of the windows and both of the frames for our solar oven and dehydrator project (the glass for the oven lid and the screens for the dehydrator trays).  She said she’d be glad for us to use them since they wouldn’t need them.

Life is never boring, is it?  There’s always something more to learn about and do!

Avivah