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Posts Tagged ‘dehydrating’

There has been lots of dehydrating in my kitchen lately!  Since I received my Excalibur Dehydrator I’ve been working at clearing out the freezer.  I’m happy to say that all the veggies I had frozen have now been dehydrated!  This is a huge space and energy savings.  It also frees up my freezer space for meat and things waiting to be canned.

These are peppers and mixed vegetables before and after dehydrating.

Recently a dear friend asked me if I would like a dehydrator she was no longer using.  I was just so excited!  I’ve been canning for over 15 years and I would never give that up.   However dehydrating has many benefits.  It saves a LOT of space and properly stored many items can last up to 30 years.    Standard guidelines on canned goods are 1 year, although myself and many canners have used them well past that and they were just fine.

My main interest in dehydrating is time savings, space savings and long term storage.

This is the dehydrator I have except that mine has 4 trays.  I love it, enough that I will be getting a larger  Excalibur
one ASAP.

Below is what I’ve been dehydrating in the past week.  The bag of corn was a 1kg (2.2 lb) frozen bag, it now fits in just 1 medium zip lock bag!  Each bag of peppers had taken up 4 medium zip lock bags before dehydrating.  We bought lots on a case sale last summer, diced and froze them. The bottom right are blueberries.  Last week a local store had 600 g tubs of frozen wild organic blueberry’s on sale.   Now these will be easy to add to yogurt or baked goodies!  On the bottom left are banana chips, or what is left at them.   lol  The kids just love them!

I decided to join Crystal at Money Saving Mom and FishMomma at Life as Mom in the freezer cooking day.  Although in my case I’m spreading it out over a few days.  I find with many young little ones it’s much easier to spread the work out this way.

I actually started a few days ago and a little differently from many people.  I’m partly emptying my freezers! Yes I’m working at taking many of the vegetables and fruits out and dehydrating them.  This will save us a lot of freezer space and keep them in good condition longer then freezing.

Below is my plan although it may change depending on the sales this week.

My OAMC list for the next few days:

• Smooth Marmalade x 2
• Grapefruit Marmalade
• dehydrate blueberries
  
• dehydrate zucchini from freezer
• Whole wheat bread x8
• Blueberry muffins x 2 batches
• Waffles
• BBQ marinated chicken