Yet more dehydration

I went back to the haymarket "farmer's" market today and bought 10 pineapples for $5. That's not $5 each, but total. I also got 25 big carrots (I'll weigh them later) for another $5. I got home by 7 and spent the next two and a half hours working on produce. I zested almost 40 lemons, added the zest to 2 jugs of vodka (totaling a bit over 3 liters) for limoncello, juiced all the lemons, strained it through 3 successively finer strainers, and then got to work on the pineapples. 9 of them got cut up into chunks, dipped in lemon juice water, and put into the dehydrator. The tenth got made into sticks, which were also added to the dehydrator. About half the cores also went into the dehydrator, and the rest into the freezer (the dehydrator was full). I'm not sure what will become of the cores; perhaps fruit vinegar.

The carrots will keep until the pineapple is all dehydrated. Then they will all get peeled, grated/diced/chopped into coins, and dehydrated. I'll probably favor dicing, but a few should probably get made into other shapes. In the future, I hope to add celery, cabbage, and tomatoes to my stock of dried vegetables, and to also add some more fruits; bananas seem strangely affordable for what they are, but peaches, pears, and apples are also good candidates. There seems to be a good balance between what I can carry and what I can reasonably dehydrate in a week.

I should spend some time focusing on stored food recipes. I should be able to develop at least a dozen each for breakfast, lunch, and dinner without too much effort. Ideally, they should be achievable with solar cooking, or at least simple boiling or frying; ovens are, after all, a culinary luxury in many scenarios.

On vacuum sealers

Over the last few days, I've chopped and dehydrated two cases of bell peppers. Over the next few weeks, I intend to dehydrate as may vegetables as feasible; carrots, celery, onions, etc. I'd like for these things to last as long as feasible, and vacuum packing is an excellent option. I don't generally care for more of the options out there; things like foodsavers rely on electricity and a lot of complicated machinery. So I purchased a pump-n-seal, a sort of manual vacuum pump designed for food preservation. I have been aware of it for some time, but it had been out of stock until recently. I also purchased a pair of jar lid adapters from another company, so I can hopefully vacuum seal things in jars without modifying the lids. I also found a box of 12 16-ounce ball jars at my local michael's for $10; once my pump and lid adapters arrive, hopefully I can start to vacuum pack the things I've dehydrated.

The other noteworthy thing today; I went to my local grainger looking for a shaft key for my grain mill. The guy working there asked me about dimensions, and then literally just gave me a shaft key. Now my grain mill is working, and all it took was a short detour and a few minutes.

I came across a great idea today; keep water in any empty jars you're storing. It takes up no extra space, and the extra water could be useful. If nothing else, use it to make a hot water bath next time you empty out jars in order to can them.

The economics of dehydration, continued

I made oatmeal in my new (to me) insulated container this morning. It turned out perfectly, and took very little energy to cook. A lot could be said for retained heat cooking, particularly if a reasonably simple and robust solar device could heat water to boiling.

I also went on a long walk today to the haymarket farmer's market. It runs on Fridays and Saturdays; if you go late on Saturdays, you can get some good deals on produce. For example, I bought two crates of bell peppers for $8 a crate, or about 80 cents a pound (1 crate orange and 1 crate yellow). I diced the yellow peppers when I got home and filled up 6 trays of my dehydrator with them. Another 2 trays got filled with the 83 buckeyes I picked up during the walk. I had previously picked up perhaps a dozen and stored them in a plastic tub, but they molded quite quickly. I plan to keep these ones in the dehydrator until I find time to pulverize them and then dehydrate the powder.

So it appears that, for peppers at least, my dehydrator can hold 30-40 of them (depending on their size) when diced. They should be dry in another day, or two at the most, and I can dice and dry the other crate. Perhaps I can spend the next few Saturdays getting a few crates of produce on closeout and turning them into tomato powder, dehydrated chopped leeks, and the like. Of course, there is the question of how the results should be stored.