Dehydrating Fruits and Vegetables

The next time you go to the grocery store and they are having a great sale or your garden is overproducing, try my friend Amy's trick for easy winter soups. It seems like every time lately that I wanted to make a soup or stew, I was out of two very important soup ingredients, carrots and celery. Either they had gone bad or the grandsons had eaten them or I just plain forgot to buy them. My friend Amy told me that I should try her trick of dehydrating my vegetables. Amy loves the farmers market and when she finds fruits or vegetables on sale, she always buys more than her family needs so that she can dry some to fill the canisters on her kitchen counter and also she makes fruit roll ups for her two vegetarian teenagers.

I was kind of skeptical if I was going to be able to do this but she taught me some neat tricks that made it a breeze. First I went to Walmart and checked out dehydrators and found that they run around $20.00. My husband found one at the Harbor Freight Company for $15.00. Harbor Freight is a tool outlet that sells all kinds of tools. They also have a website where you could order a dehydrator and E-bay has these for sale all the time.

Once I had bought my dehydrator, I really needed to decide what I was going to dehydrate. I decided I would start with celery and carrots and onions, I figured I could not mess these up too bad. Getting started was pretty easy. I washed all of them really well and then cut them into bite size pieces. The onions I cut into slices. I just laid them out on the trays and turned the dehydrator on and before I knew it (in about 12 hours) my vegetables were dry.

Now I am a jar saver. I save jars from salsa and from Miracle Whip all the time. I have even been known to buy a product just because it came in a cool jar but that is another story. One dehydrator full of carrots about half filled a Sam's brand salsa jar. Hey, I was on a roll so I finished up the carrots and moved on to the celery, Amy taught me that you can dry more than one vegetable in the dehydrator at a time so I was off and running. I learned that you need to dry vegetables that have just about the same moisture content if you are going to mix them up so carrots and celery worked great together.

I love this method of preservation because they last longer than if I had frozen them and I can keep them handy right next to my stove and I find myself throwing in a handful of these in a lot things I would normally not thought of adding it to, like spaghetti sauce or a casserole. As long as it is a wet concoction like spaghetti sauce or soup, these vegetables plump right back up and look just like fresh and taste like it too.

On the Internet you can find many charts for approximate drying times. You can dry lots of vegetables and when the price goes sky high in the off season, you can have a supply always at hand. I now dry mushrooms as well because I love to buy fresh sliced mushrooms but I never can use the whole container before it goes bad. Now I use what I need in a salad or dish and dry the rest. No more waste and I always have them on hand.

Amy dries apples and makes banana chips for her family, Here is her quick method for making dried apples slices. She cores the apples first with a handy apple corer that you can buy at Walmart. It looks like a pie with the slices cut and a hole in the middle. You just set this down on top of the apple and push down and it cores the apple and gives you quartered apples. Now she takes the quarters and makes them into slices. Then she dips them into lemon juice to keep them a light color. If they are tart apples, she drizzles them with a little honey and pops them in to her dehydrator. You can use the same method for banana slices. She can not keep enough of these in the house, her kids and husband barely let these get done before they want to eat them.

You can also dry herbs in your dehydrator. Amy suggests using the fruit roll up tray that comes with most dehydrators only because it makes for a less messy job. But you can still use the regular trays too. She also says "Share the Wealth", dried vegetables, some beans and a vegetable bullion cube packaged in a pretty jar makes a great gift.

Happy Dehydrating!