Freeze Dryer – Second Load

With the blog being down, I’ve totally lost my train of thought. One thing I know is that, since I love blogging so much, I should learn to fix a few things myself. I knew what was wrong last night; I knew basically what needed to be fixed . . but I am not confident enough to go in there and do some of those things myself. There are a lot of things I am not afraid to tackle but when it comes to the blog, I panic. Last night, I was in the middle of a blog post when that “Cannot Connect to Server” message popped up. I turned my screen around to show it to Vince. He said “What are you going to do?” I shrugged my shoulders. He said “Do you know how to fix it?” I said NO! He said “What are you going to do?” If I didn’t know 10 seconds ago . . chances are I don’t know now either!  🙂

I will tell you this, but I’m not telling anyone else:  The next time I have to swat a bug on a touch screen, I’ll make sure I’m not editing the blog when I do it!.

Anyway . . it’s fixed and life goes on.

I can’t remember what I’ve already written and what I thought about writing so if you get to a point where you’re thinking “She already told us that” . . just chalk it up to the blog breakdown and my resulting mental meltdown!

The first batch of stuff (mangoes, pineapple, bananas, apples and yogurt) are drying. According to my calculations, they should be done about 1 p.m. but I think the freeze dryer decides the final time based on something I do not understand.

The next batch is on the second set of trays, in the freezer (the regular freezer we already had). Here’s what I’m going to freeze dry next:

1. Cheesecake bites: Because I’m still experimenting, I only did two slices. If it works and if we love it, I’ll freeze dry the rest. If we don’t love it, we’ll have cheesecake for dessert for a while. Two slices filled up two trays.
2. Jello: I made a box of Cotton Candy Jello. I made it according to package directions and put it in a 9 x 13 pan and took it to the shop fridge. First, walking over there with a dish of liquid jello . . not good but the ants love me. I left a trail of yummy, sweet, sticky food for them.  Because our shop fridge is  . . what’s a nice word?? Cheap??  . . anything near the back of it freezes. The back third of the pan of jello froze and trying to get it out of the pan, it wanted to tear and get jagged edges instead of letting me cut it into nice rectangles. Even in the house with the A/C working great, it was starting to get sticky by the time I got out the 2/3 that wasn’t frozen and got it all placed on the freeze dryer trays. I’ll have to come up with a better plan for the jello if we love it (and I hope we do because I bought 20 boxes!) Two-thirds of a 9 x 13 pan of jello filled up 1.5 trays.
3. Red Hot Marshmallows: I dumped about 3/4 of a bag of mini marshmallows into the powdered red hots and filled up the remaining half tray of jello and one full pan of marshmallows.

As soon as I get the first batch of food out of the freeze dryer, I’ll do post on that.