Last night I took a picture of our dinner and with the contractor being here, totally forgot to show you. How did you make it through the night without knowing what we had for dinner? 🙂
Seriously, the reason I wanted to show is because I cooked some of the dehydrated potatoes. Later today I will do a post about dehydrating potatoes but before I told you about the beauty of dehydrating potatoes, I wanted to show you that once rehydrated, they truly are edible. Vince said he would not have known they weren’t fresh from the garden so that’s very nice to hear.
Dinner
When gardening, it seems there’s often feast or famine. Right now, we’re overun with yellow squash. Three of them is more than we can eat. Each day I’m picking about a dozen of them so even if we eat squash every single night, I’m not able to use them all so I will dehydrate some of them.
On the plate, you will see potatoes from the garden, dehydrated, rehydrated and cooked, squash from the garden, tomatoes from the garden and ham from the youth fair pig that we bought. Everything on that plate was grown in my county and most of it was grown in my back yard.
The reason that I have already used a bag of my dehydrated potatoes is because one bag wasn’t sealed completely and ended up with air in it so I used that bag to get photos for the blog. The potatoes I’m drying today will go into quart Mason jars and will be sealed with the jar lid attachment. Not sure if it’s environmentally better but I feel better using the jars I will re-use, even though though the lid will not be re-used. I have not had good luck with Tattler re-usable lids for vacuum sealing but I do love them for pressure canning.
Susan says
I bought two packages of the tattler lids and I really don’t like them for anything at all! But I have a friend who does, so off they went to her. A dehydrator is on my list, too. Right now, all I do is my herbs from the deck, so I just let them sit out or use 150 in the oven with the door propped open. I want to do other things, though.
Liz N says
Love home grown potatoes and I grow bushels of them. I do have a dirt cellar to store them in but dehydrating them would be a big plus!
Vicki W says
Our squash are going crazy too. I make and freeze squash soup. It lasts for months in the freezer. I bet it could be canned too.
Helen Koenig1 says
I used to dehydrate foods LONG before I owned a dehydrator! I had a gas stove with a setting that was only slightly warmer than the pilot light – and would dry sweet corn,, peppers (sweet or hot), greens of every description (even lettuce – for soups – not salads!), all kinds of fruits, squash (although I didn’t like the taste of it – prefer the freeze dried I buy in – until I figure out HOW to freeze dry!). I also used to string greenbeans on a line (blanched – and dried they were called leather britches!).
That was when I lived on the farm in IL (where I used to make goat or cow’s milk cheese, cows milk butter, and had a LOT of chickens, ducks and geese and a surfeit of eggs daily!)
Now I live in a city – and have a dehydrator (makes me dependent on the electric company – which I do NOT like!) – and dry just about any fruit or vegetable that has the chance to cross my path – from red or green tomatoes (makes wonderful fried tomatoes) to cucumbers (for crumbles in salads OR for one of several cucumber cooking recipes I have!) to celery to … well, whatever!
Items I STILL depend on buying in dehydrated – or canned – include soups (no pressure canner – YET), meats, poultry or fish (see previous note), squash (I like the flavor better with freeze dried at least on SUMMER squash!), eggs, milk (still haven’t’ found a price I like for butter or cheese – other than buying in cheese in the large paraffin coated wheels, which I can’t find either!), whole grains. Although I have a grinder, I don’t have the land area to raise wheat, rye, buckwheat, rice,or oats – although I used to raise all this (except rice) when I lived on the farm – and would hand scythe, bundle and stack, beat with a plastic baseball bat to separate out the grain from the straw, winnow as well as grind. (high school and town folk used to drive out my way daily to see what the “crazy lady” was doing! Was a BUSY road! for a road so way back of beyond!)
AngieG9 says
I didn’t know you could dry potatoes. I have oven dried a lot of things, and am going to have my son help me build a hanging dryer to put in the window so I won’t have to use the electricity for drying. As for squash, I’ve tried to can it and it wasn’t any good, tried to freeze it–no good. The only solution I ever found was to plant only 1 or 2 plants and they would produce enough to feed the entire county all summer. That was, until my mom found a recipe for squash relish, which I still use to can every squash I can get my hands on. Now, in the city, I don’t have the space for a garden, so I have to wait for the farm truck ladies to come by with their bounty, then make my relish. And I have to remember that I live alone, so I don’t have to make tons of it any more, just enough to last me a year. Love relish with my beans and cornbread. Also love fried green tomatoes, so I can some for winter, so I can open a jar and get the taste of summer during a cold, rainy, sleeting day. I just wish I had a half acre left so I could have a small garden. You just never appreciate what you have until it’s gone sometimes.
barbara says
i didn’t know that you could vacuum seal and then not use the fridge, but just store the jar. i thought that you could only room-temp store after something was canned.
Linda Steller says
Oh yum! I am optimistically looking forward to being able to eat carbs in my future (even though I’ve not heard from the insurance company yet). I can’t grow a lot on my little plot here in town, but I’m thinking of heading out to the farm to the north of me in a few days for their u-pick cherries. They are so good. For now, I can probably only eat a few at a time, but if I pit them and free them into little marbles, I can bag them up and freeze them. They keep for a long time. I dry a lot of things in my little dehydrator, and I make my own jerky.