A bushel of apples

I ordered a bushel of St. Lawrence apples from Bailey's Local Foods on Friday and I've now used just about all of them up so all that are left are a few to eat as snacks over the next week or so.
I dehydrated most of them. It was easy with my new apple machine! It is just a simple machine where you turn a handle and it peels, slices, and cores each apple. It was awesome, I couldn't believe it.


And this is what you end up with!


Here's the final product, a huge bag of dehydrated apples, plus a few already ripped up in that measuring cup ready to be added to granola (I made the granola with extra cinnamon so it is really good!), and one sheet of fruit leather. I made the fruit leather just by blending up a few apples and adding some strawberries from the freezer - it is just like 'fruit to go'. I also made an apple pie and some apple muffins.

Drying Mushrooms

I bought my dehydrator and it arrived last week. I settled on the Nesco Square dehydrator and bought the maximum number of trays. So far I have done another big batch of little tomatoes. And some mushrooms. My home grown mushrooms still aren't doing so well, am still working on reviving them. So when I had the opportunity to buy 3 pounds of local organic shitaake mushrooms I took it. Here are some pictures of them drying process, I used all 8 drying trays and filled up to the top 2 small freezer bags. I also kept a bunch fresh to put on a pizza later in the week. I definitely want to try to do a cream of mushroom soup sometime when it gets a bit colder.

``Sun``-dried Tomatoes

I had been thinking I had planted way too many little tomatoes which I can`t do much with but eat fresh and not enough big tomatoes that I could try canning with. But then I remembered that Eliot Coleman said he dries his tomatoes and of course cherry tomatoes are better for that. So I looked up the best way to do that without a dehydrator and found that people were doing them in their oven without any special equipment. So I did it.

I washed the tomatoes and cut them in half (great thing about doing cherry tomatoes was I didn`t have to bother cutting out the stem part and they turned out fine). Then I lay them cut side up on a baking tray and put them in the oven.
People on the internet were talking about putting their oven as low as it goes to about 200F but mine goes all the way down to 100F so I did that for a while. But I got impatient so eventually I went up to 175F. And sometimes I had the door open and sometimes I didn`t. They really started going once I turned the oven to 175F. So it took about 6 hours in total but could have been faster if I had had the oven at 175F for longer.

Anyway I think they turned out pretty great! A lot were crispy, not really sun dried tomato texture but still worked and some were still too juicy to be sun dried tomatoes. But they all tasted like sun dried tomatoes and I figure will be great to add to pasta and maybe even some kind of really fancy soup. And so that I didn`t have to bother getting them all perfectly dry I just threw them all into the freezer when most were done so I don`t have to worry about mould. It was fun too. I am now thinking I definitely want to buy a dehydrator. Just think of all the fun things I could dehydrate!