Dehydrating the bounty

I do love my little American Harvest dehydrator.

It takes very little time to slice up some veggies or fruit to put on the trays, then it gets plugged in overnight, and in the morning, you have dehydrated food ready to go into jars for storage! Everything shrinks during dehydration, so six or seven trays full of sliced veggies will usually fit into a peanut butter jar once they’ve been dried out. With our small pantry, this is a definite bonus.

The big advantage of the dehydrator is that you can work with small quantities as they come available – you don’t need to clear the kitchen and “do the canning”, you can just chop up whatever’s on hand.

During the summer, the excess spinach from the garden got dried: it makes a wonderful addition to omelettes, crumbled and sprinkled over top while it’s cooking.

Now that the onions have been harvested, the big ones have been braided together and hung up to dry, but the smaller ones, or those bruised or otherwise unlikely to survive very long  have been chopped up and dehydrated (with the machine set outside overnight … that’s an odour you do not want filling your house!).

It’s a good feeling to make use of things that would otherwise go to waste.