by Texas Homesteader ~
I always have a couple of jars of dehydrated cubed potatoes in my pantry. From a preparedness standpoint I love to have dehydrated food available.
Jars of dehydrated food aren’t dependent upon electricity to keep them preserved like when storing food in a freezer. 
by Texas Homesteader ~
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Last year’s pumpkin harvest was truly out-o-control! I harvested so many pumpkins! Sure, I shared several of them with family & friends. But I still ended up with mountains of my own.
I love to use these heirloom pumpkins for puree in my Pumpkin Granola so I cooked ’em up & pureed them. They were measured out into 2-cup measurements and frozen for future use.
But RancherMan was the wild-hog-hunting KING and our freezer was filled to capacity with pork. But I still had two remaining pumpkins…
They had some staying power, still looking as fresh as the day I harvested them. But I really needed to do something with them before they started to deteriorate. With no spare freezer room, what will I do?
I decided to Dehydrate the Pumpkins.
by Texas Homesteader ~
I like to dehydrate fresh pumpkin. It’s so easy to do, y’all. And unlike using the freezer, dehydrated pumpkin uses no additional energy to store. Come see what I did!
by Texas Homesteader ~
Food waste – we all hate it. We work diligently to make sure none of that food we’ve paid our hard-earned money for is ever wasted.
But are we doing all we can? Maybe… But maybe not!
Have you ever thought about eating your compost?
Stay with me now, I’m not suggesting that you root through the compost heap and snack on its contents.
by Texas Homesteader ~
Every year my aunt shares with us the abundance from her very productive apple tree. She always goes through quite a bit of effort to make sure I have all the apples I can possibly tote back home!
But in the end RancherMan & I hauled back all we could fit into our small car. I’ll not let any of them go to waste – I set out to preserve all those beautiful apples!
It was a lot of work I’m not gonna lie. But after some time in the kitchen preserving them we have plenty of apple deliciousness in the pantry. Want to see some of the things I was able to do with them?
by Texas Homesteader ~
Remember recently I ended up with a boatload of fresh carrots? Now there was no way to consume that many carrots before they went bad.
So I was frantically sharing as many as I could with friends, family & neighbors but there were Still. So. Many. Carrots.
So I dehydrated a huge bunch of them so I could enjoy them all winter long in our hot soups & stews. (you can read about dehydrating carrots here)
These dehydrated carrots look awesome in my pantry in shining glass jars. And they take no additional energy to store such as a refrigerator or freezer.
But I wanted to know how they would taste if I reconstituted them to enjoy as a veggie side dish. Let’s check it out, shall we?
by Texas Homesteader ~
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Apples, apples everywhere! My aunt shared ten whopping bushels with us this year! As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, there were many delicious things we did to preserve the apples but I tried something new this year: Fruit Roll-Ups!
by Texas Homesteader ~
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I was given a boatload of fresh carrots recently and I didn’t want them to go to waste. Now I’ve written before about turning ugly carrots into beautiful carrots by chopping misshapen carrots into prettier more uniform pieces.
In the past I’d dehydrated them using my small household-sized dehydrator. But now I have a 9-tray Excalibur dehydrator. I can really do some damage to that mountain of carrots now! Come see what I did.
