By Texas Homesteader ~
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Tomatoes are the darling of the vegetable garden around these parts. Some like to plant squash, some like peppers. But by golly almost everyone has a tomato bush (or two, or three…) in their garden!
None of my tomatoes will go to waste. Even when they’re producing too fast for me to eat fresh. I like to dice & dehydrate those fresh tomatoes to use in my wintertime soups. It’s easy!
by Texas Homesteader ~
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A dear friend told me about dehydrating tomato puree (sometimes seasoned) into a leather. WHAT?? Tomato leather??
Yes, tomato leather can be used to simplify your pizza night. Just plop a tomato leather on top of your crust and start adding fillings. The leather rehydrates as the pizza cooks. Oh yeah, I’ve gotta try this!
by Texas Homesteader
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I recently acquired two different varieties of ripe plums that totaled about 30 lbs. Now I love fruit, and plums are some of my faves – so sweet, so juicy! But I’m going to have to preserve some of these plums if I’m going to keep them from going bad before they’re all consumed.
I love plum jelly but I’ve made so much jelly lately including apple butter, blueberry jam and even honeysuckle jelly that I don’t need any more in my stockpile. Even though I like to stock my pantry with jellies to sweeten my homemade yogurt, with only two of us at home these days I don’t want to make more than we can use. What else can I do with these delicious plums?
Hummm… I like to sweeten my homemade pumpkin granola with dried fruit and I recently used the last of my dehydrated jujube fruit. So maybe I can dehydrate these plums into raisin-sized chunks to naturally sweeten my granola?
by Texas Homesteader
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Recently I had a large quantity of tomatoes to preserve. In the process of making my sauce I removed most of the seeds and tossed them into my compost before I even cooked the tomatoes down.
When the tomatoes were cooked I used a sieve to separate the cooked tomatoes from the skins so I would have smoother sauce.
Now I read somewhere that instead of throwing them away you can dehydrate the skins and grind them into powder to use to thicken soups or make your own tomato paste.
Oh yeah, I’m *SO* gonna do that!
by Texas Homesteader ~
Early spring is a great time to pick up cabbage for cheap. But you want to make sure you go through it all while it’s fresh.
There are several ways we enjoy cabbage, but I also dehydrate it to enjoy for months.
Continue reading Texas Homesteader ~
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I’ve planted many bell pepper plants in my garden this year. But it’s still too early in the season for them to be producing. So I stumbled upon a great deal on bell peppers at the store recently. Yeah, I mean like 15 peppers for $0.99 kinda great deal! After I fainted and before I could catch a breath I grabbed up about 5 of them. Oh I suppose I could have grabbed more but I only wanted to buy what we would use.
Other than stuffed peppers (which RancherMan absolutely LOVES) I cook with bell peppers fairly often. Once I got home I found that I still had stuffed bell peppers in the freezer. Maybe I can just freeze them to use as an ingredient in my cooking? Hummm… my freezer space is pretty tight so there’s no room to chop & freeze them for later. What to do? I know – I’ll dehydrate them!
by Texas Homesteader ~
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After finding a great deal on apples I dehydrated them into soft chewy chunks. I’ll add them to my homemade granola. Good for me, good for my wallet & good for the environment!
by Texas Homesteader ~
Last season I was trying to preserve as much garden excess as I could. I hated for any of it to go to waste. So we ate fresh from the garden every day, then I shared with family, friends & community. Then I preserved as much as I could either by freezing, canning or dehydrating.
You could say I was bitten by the dehydrating bug because the more I dehydrated those veggies the more enamored I became with the whole process. I was amazed at the small amount of space my dehydrated shredded potatoes took up in the pantry. I loved my dehydrated jujubes sprinkled in my homemade granola. I really enjoyed tossing dehydrated garden veggies into my never-ending soup. But now I’m experimenting with yet another way to use them. Salt-free veggie granules. OH YEAH!
