Dehydrating Foods

Quick post this weekend to let you all know about a good video on YouTube about dehydrating foods.

You don't need a really expensive food dehydrator to start making your own delicious dehydrated foods. You can pick up basic food dehydrators many places; we've found that the ones with the clear trays don't seem to work as well as all the others, but you can experiment on your own.

A family favorite at our house is dehydrated banana chips - we slice ours and let them soak briefly in lemon juice to keep the bananas from turning brown, then lightly pat them with a paper towel before placing them on the dehydrator trays that have been lightly sprayed with no-stick spray.

We dehydrate ours until they are crunchy - the lemon juice seems to bring out the sweetness in the bananas and homemade ones taste delicious compared to the bland ones you buy in the bags in stores.

Of course, the king of dehydrators is the Excalibur and everyone I've talked to who owns one absolutely loves it. We have one on our list of future purchases.

You can dehydrate lots of fruits and veggies - just remember that the more water content in the item the longer it will take to dehydrate. We've done blueberries, bananas, onions, apples and made lots of our own fruit leather.

If you haven't investigate dehydrating foods as part of your preparedness activities - learn more about it through this video and then give it a try!

Video Link:




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Homestead How-To Series

This is a GREAT series that might be of interest to those of you who home school or who want to learn more about any of these particular topics - and through this week only the 10 CD set is only $99.

I just received an email about this through my home school group - this list of CDs was on my wishlist for my anniversary and I just ordered them!

Thought I'd share the sale info for anyone else who might be interested.

Link:

http://franklinsprings.com/allfilms/...st-ladies.html

Series includes:

The Art of Bread Making
The Art of Candle Making
The Art of Soap Making
The Art of Canning
The Art of Gardening
The Art of Herbs
The Art of Cooking
The Art of Dairy
The Art of Sewing
The Art of Quilting

You can also buy the series in individual CDs or in smaller sets.

For more info about the series, you can see a YouTube video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPMl2jyMM5E


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Canning Time!

Whew, this is turning out to be a very busy week! I've been canning every day!

Our Asian pear tree set a ton of fruit this year; while the fruit isn't as large as last year, it is more abundant. I've picked approximately 1/2 of the tree which yielded 55 pounds of pears! I'll pick the rest of the tree in the next week.

So far, I've processed about about half of the harvest. I've made 8 pints of pear butter and 8 pints of pear pickles. I have another batch of pear pickles to put up tomorrow, which will yield another 8 pints.

This leaves about 1/2 the pears I picked still left to process - most of those will be pear butter. The pears I pick next week will be brandied pears, pears in syrup and possibly some pear mincemeat.

I also purchased 33 pounds of mixed yellow squash, zucchini and cucumbers from a friend who has a large garden, and today I worked to turn that into hot pickled veggies. I added some banana peppers and sweet peppers from our garden, some cauliflower and carrots I got at the store, some jalapeno peppers, garlic, onion - yum. I made 17 quarts of this today and it is still being processed as I type this evening.

Pictures will post soon, I've taken them but haven't had a spare minute to upload them.

More soon!

Global Wheat Fungus Inevitable

An excellent read here for those of you not familiar with the Ug-99 Durable Wheat Rust fungus that is spreading - most scientists say containment is likely impossible. Read more here:

For a brief overview:
Survival Blog: Ug-99 and The Ugly Times Ahead - There'll Be Fungus Among Us

For more in-depth information:
Borlaug Global Rust Initiative

Summary: Now is the time to be putting away your stores of wheat if you haven't already, before prices start to rise more than they already have. As a reminder, hard wheats are usually used for bread making since they are higher in gluten. Soft wheats are usually best for pastries and pastas. Also, consider alternate sources of grains: spelt, millet, barley, rye, kamut, triticale, amaranth and quinoa.

Some sources for ordering grain:

Bob's Red Mill

Honeyville Grain

Emergency Essentials

Walton Feed

Amazon.com

Frontier Survival

Bulk Foods

Aaoob Foods

Making Jam with Less Sugar

Thought I'd share this info about a pectin product that is available that will allow you to make your jams and jellies with far less sugar than usual; you can even use sugar substitutes or no sugar at all.

It's called Pomona's Universal Pectin and you can get it at Canning Pantry. A 1 ounce package will allow you to make 2-4 recipes using 4-6 cups of fruit per recipe.

It uses the peel and pulp of lemons, limes and grapefruits as the pectin source in combination with monocalcium phosphate to help your jams/jellies set. You can read more at the links above.

I'll be making some strawberry jam using some the first of next week - the strawberry jam a friend of mine made using this pectin was absolutely delicious - you could taste the strawberries without being overwhelmed by sugar!

Thought this might be helpful since the prices of sugar are supposed to increase; also because it will help you perhaps not have to store quite as much sugar. The Pomona's Pectin is supposed to have an indefinite shelf life.