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Learn to dehydrate food
In all my years of grocery shopping, I
never compared prices from the various food stores around me. I
always went to a particular store and tried to buy the foods with the best
prices there at the time. Then I discovered that each store has it's
own promotions each week. When our budget became tighter, I started
paying attention to this and started buying the sale items from the
different grocery stores.
The problem for me then was with the fresh
fruits and vegetables - How could I take advantage of the sales and
buy as much as possible but not have the food spoil. When you buy
several quarts of strawberries on sale, you can't eat them fast enough
before they start going bad. What to do? You can freeze them,
make jelly, or a wonderful thing that I discovered was to dehydrate them!
I checked into the various types of
dehydrators available and discovered two helpful tips that were important
to my decision - 1) get one where that is set up on such a way where the
heat and air flow is even enough that you don't have to move the drying
racks around in the middle of the dehydration time, and 2) buy the biggest
one (the most drying racks) that you can afford.
Once the dehydrator arrived, I started
dehydrating food regularly. The food dehydrator came with basic
instructions and it has been fairly simple to do. The only things
are that it does take time to slice and dice the foods, and you need to
learn to slice food in consistent sizes. So I have now set aside
time each day to do this domestic duty. I have had to change my
thinking to incorporate this into my life. Having had opportunities
to work from home, my habit for the most part has been to 'work' when I am
at home - work on my business work, that is. Because of this, I have
had the mindset that housework and cooking is a waste of time - I should
be working on business things to make the most use of my time. But I
am discovering that doing domestic chores around the house is important
work too and am learning to set aside time each day to do it without
feeling guilty.
Fruits and beef jerky are becoming our
family's favorites. There are great sales every week on fruits.
We have been enjoying strawberries, bananas, and apples the most. My
husband and I recently lost a lot of weight, so we are eating healthier
foods and are including these dried fruits as our snacks (instead of
potato chips and toasted cheese snacks and ice cream!).
I try to store half of what I make and have
the rest to eat. So far everything is so good, the storage part
hasn't worked out as good as I thought (it all gets eaten or I give it
away as samples and gifts to others), so I think I need to step up my
production. Beef jerky is the one that goes the fastest! My
husband and son really love it! This makes me happy, but still I
have to hide it from them and ration it out so that it lasts a while!
I've also dehydrated vegetables like
mushrooms, celery, carrots when they are on sale to have on hand.
I've also attempted to make fruit roll-ups out of strawberries, apples,
and kiwi fruit, but it turned out more like fruit jerky, in that it was
brittle and broke apart when I tried to roll it up. So there is some
trial and error involved in this, but for the most part it has been a
great experience. It is healthy, economical and the food tastes
good. And now I need to go so I can get the beef jerky onto the
racks! I'm running low and my husband is going to be searching for
some again soon :-)
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