January 1 - Day Two Update

A couple of you e-mailed me yesterday and asked me about dehydrating vegetables and fruits.  I absolutely love doing it and it's so handy to have things stored without taking up refrigerator space.  I use the Excalibur Dehydrator; in my opinion it's the best brand out there.

I added a link above to Amazon, which is where I got mine.  When I bought mine it came with a book, not just a pamphlet type explanation.  If it doesn't any more then you really should buy one.  I recently bought a new one from Dehydrate 2 Store.  It's a great book with lots of tips and recipes.  Her website is excellent as well - she has videos you can watch if you're interested.  Also if you're buying, add the Dehydrator Sheets here - they're cheap and worth having for the small things that might fall through the regular sheets.

My favorite things to dehydrate are frozen hash brown potatoes (I use them along with 2 or 3 fresh potatoes in my potato soup, carrots, celery, onion, apples, pears, pineapple and blueberries.  Yes, you can dehydrate frozen things.  You can dehydrate canned vegetables but frozen are better because canning loses some of the nutrients and frozen maintains more of the good stuff.  Sweet potatoes can be rehydrated and used for mashed sweet potatoes (delicious!) or sweet potato casserole.  I've also done squash but I only use it in soup - I throw in a handful when I make vegetable soup.  My grandchildren love the apples and pineapple as snacks.  You can rehydrate blueberries and use them in muffins.

Properly stored dehydrated foods can be kept for years.  I usually just put mine in jars with a tight fitting lid and they last for over a year that way.  If I think it's going to be longer I put an oxygen absorber in and then put the lid on.  That's one of those things that will pull the oxygen out of the air in a sealed container.

It might interest you to know that in Biblical times dehydration was about the only way to store food long term.  Their desert temperatures allowed them to do that easily.  Some wheat that was about 2000 years old was found several years ago and scientists were able to sprout it - amazing!