Adventures in Dehydrating

My mom found me an Excalibur Dehydrator at a garage sale last year for $10. It's an old one and only has five trays but it works.

And this year I am discovering how lovely it really is.

I dehydrated a few trays of apples and pears last year and we really enjoyed them but I wasn't fanatical about it.

I'm afraid I might become fanatical this year.

I have 3 1/2 quarts of dried blueberries.


Apparently you're suppose to blanch blueberries first to break the skins so they dry better, but I didn't know this when I started, so I just threw them on the trays. They turned out just fine. Some of the skins are papery and flake right off, but it hasn't made a huge difference to us in texture or taste.

And this lovely, very little jar is powdered spinach. An entire dehydrator's worth of spinach rubbed through a mesh strainer. I've since dried another 5 trays and so the jar is almost halfway full! : )
I have plans for adding this to smoothies this winter. And the other day we added it to tuna fish, no one really knew it was there but they were all eating their spinach!

Actually, it's not a fight to get my kids to eat fresh spinach we just couldn't get through all of the greens from our CSA so thought I'd dehydrate it so as not to waste. Oh...and there are powdered beet greens in there as well now. We're not huge fans of anything beet, but the dried greens hardly have any taste at all.

Right now the dehydrator is full of zucchini and I have plans of drying many more apples and pears this year.

I think eventually I'll save up for a larger dehydrator.