Food Dehydrator Fun

by Victoria
(Maine)

I had perfectly reasonable plans to make sauce and freeze or can it with our tomato abundance. Then you started talking about dehydrators. It seemed almost too simple to just dry the darn things and have sun dried tomatoes all winter, so I convinced my husband that we really needed one. That was the beginning.

This weekend was my first chance to really play with it and I've had so much fun! We certainly have plenty of sun dried Roma tomatoes. Then I thought the cherry tomatoes might work well - they're so sweet, dehydrating would only concentrate it, right? Then on to the crackers. That was the part that had really fascinated me when you first talked about it. Last night we had some great red, spicy chips with my mom's leftover vegan chili. Perfect! My husband was pretty impressed that I managed to create the chips in the dehydrator. They were thinner than I would want in a perfect world, but still plenty good. Today I have a batch of "Spicey Cheezits" from the GoneRaw website. They sure smell good, but they won't be done until the morning so I'll have an opportunity to practice patience.

Last night we also had a sauce I drizzled on the leftover chili. I found this recipe on GoneRaw as well. It was great. I used half as much salt as they ask for and think I will use even less next time. The leftover sauce was even great for dipping veggies in this afternoon for a snack.

My husband is looking forward to some fruit leathers, so that's on my next-up list, along with the corn chip recipe that you talked about on this weeks podcast.
So, although it was a significant investment, I'm so glad I took the hint and got started dehydrating. Our pantry is full of our own healthy organic tomatoes for the winter, we can finally have chips and crackers I feel good about, and it makes it so easy to add more raw foods to our diet.

I still look forward to listening on my drive to work every Monday morning. School is intense this semester, so I won't even start looking at the interactive feature - there's just no time, but I want to let you know that you regularly have a tangible positive impact on our lives.

Victoria