New Favorite Kitchen gadgets- the trusty little dehydrator & magnificent mandolin slicer

A few weeks ago, I bought a dehydrator off of craigslist with the goal of preserving our huge harvest of cherry tomatoes.  Little did I know how much I would love this trusty little dehydrator.  It a matter of a couple weeks, I have made:

1)  "Sun Dried" or dehydrated tomatoes
2)  Lots of Cinnamon Apple chips
3)  Apple & Raspberry Fruit Leather
4)  Apple Fruit Leather
5)  Zucchini Chips (drizzled with olive oil & seasoned with Adobo)

The unfortunate part of dehydrating is that I only have 6 round trays to fill!  And once the produce is fully dried it shrinks up to be a fraction of the mass that I started with.  But that "shrinking" is what makes each item so flavorful in the dehydrated state.  And a second unfortunate part of dehydrating is that I love each thing so much, that it only lasts a day in this house.

All of the above items that we've dehydrated are completely home grown and organic.  The apples were graciously given to us by a friend who has a tree that produces more apples than they know what to do with.  I should tip them off to the Joys of a dehydrator. Some of the apples came from our own trees as well.  The raspberries, tomatoes and zucchini were all grown at Redwoodshire.  So all these tasty treats have been free, minus the time and energy it took to prepare the food and run the dehydrator.





APPLE & ZUCCHINI CHIPS-
I have been hand cutting the apples and zucchini to dehydrate into chips.  I just ordered a mandoline slicer  to make the task quicker and the chip slices more uniform.  And boy it is magnificent!  There is a dial that allows you to decide how thick of slices you want to cut.  It took a fraction of the time it took me to cut the old fashion way.  It usually takes about 1 apple per tray.

 I drizzled the apples in lemon juice to prevent browning and then sprinkled them with cinnamon sugar.  For the zucchini slices I drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled them with Adobo seasoning.






FRUIT LEATHERS-
I found some easy directions on this Simply Recipes Blog, that I used as a guide to make my first batches of fruit leather.  My dehydrator came with 2 plastic sheets for making fruit leather.  First I pealed and cored the apples.  Then I cut the apples into smaller chunks, drizzled them with lemon juice and threw them into a sauce pan.  The process is exactly the same as making apple sauce.  I simply added a little bit of water to a sauce pan, and brought the apple mixture to a boil- cooking until the apples were soft.  For the Apple Raspberry leather, I added a handful of our raspberries to the pot when the apples were soft enough to be blended.  Then I pureed the mixture in my Ninja blender.  I poured mixture onto plastic sheets in dehydrator and let the dehydrator to it's thing.  Once they were finished, I cut into smaller pieces and stored in a Ziplock bag.

As previously mentioned, I LOVE dehydrating! And my new mandoline slicer makes the task so quick- in a matter of 10 minutes I can wash, peel, slice, sprinkle with cinnamon & load all 6 trays.  I am so proud of myself in preserving our abundant harvest and not letting it go to waste.  There are so many different ways to preserve produce, and by the end of the summer it's nice to find different ways to enjoy the harvest of the garden.  I can't dehydrate things fast enough.  Maybe someday I will get a larger unit.