Dehydrating Apples

Imagine a bag of yummy Pink Lady organic apples - sweet, crisp, juicy. Even the smell was great, and I simply had to purchase a bag.

It is a long time since I last dehydrated apples, and yet I love having them on hand as snacks.

The apple peeler/corer/slicer makes for easy preparation.  Simply slice the prepared apple in half and place the pieces on the drying tray.

(They can be dipped in lemon juice to stop browning, but I don't bother with this)

Then it was into the dehydrator at the 60degC fruit setting, until dried. 

I like mine more on the crispy side than the leathery side, so drying these took about 12 hours.

These apple bits are for snacking on so I'm not worried about keeping them long-term. 

An airtight jar will do just fine!

Happy snacking - and don't eat them all at once!

Margaret xx 

The Famous Five

 

Sometimes I look back over the week and wonder where all my days have gone.  If I didn’t keep a daily journal, I’d be wondering what I had done on each of those days as well.

Our weather has been so wet, wet, wet, this week and the best thing to do is stay indoors.  I’ve not been idle (all the time!), though.  My display cabinet, with ornaments, crystal etc. in it, is now sparkling clean, and my book shelves are being cleaned and the books organized a bit better than they were.

I added to my collection this morning when visiting a charity shop with my younger son, purchasing this Famous Five book.  I used to own quite a lot of them but they have disappeared in different directions over the years.

I know they are children’s books, but I actually enjoy reading one on a dreary afternoon.  This is not one I have read before, so I think I will be settling into my lounge chair with it this afternoon.

Last weekend I was invited out to dinner with some friends.  It was a lovely evening together, just five of us, and not something I have done for a long time.

There were three lemon trees on the property, absolutely laden with fruit, and I was thrilled to be given a bag of them to bring home.

Some of the lemons I have sliced into rings and dehydrated – I thought they might be nice to plonk into a glass of chilled water over summer time (not something I have tried before).  

I also dried some peel, which will probably get used when cooking different meals.

My apologies to all my blogland friends for not doing any visiting lately.  Some days I don’t even make it onto my computer!

And some days, like now, I just want to curl up with a book.

I hope everyone is keeping safe and well,

Stay happy 😊

Margaret.

Dehydrating Onions

It was not a pleasant experience, standing for nearly an hour in the kitchen with tears streaming down my face – onions make me cry!

Hubby and I purchased a dehydrator not that long before he died.  We dried corn and celery, but since then it has sat in storage and lately in a cupboard.

When I found onions on special at the supermarket I decided it was time to try out the dehydrator again.

The onions were peeled and sliced into 5mm thin rings and laid out on the trays.  I didn’t need to pre-treat them in any way, which was a bonus.

I set the machine at 50 degrees Celsius, the recommended temperature for vegetables, and dried them for ten hours (turning them over after four hours). 

The house absolutely reeked of onions when I first started, but the smell lessened as they dried – or perhaps we just got used to it!

They then sat overnight before I dried them a further three hours, by which time they had become crisp and brittle enough to crumble in my fingers.

Once the onion rings were cold I bagged them up and used a heat-sealing gadget to remove all the air.

It was a bit tricky deciding on when to bag them.  I wanted them completely cold so that they wouldn’t sweat in the bag, but I also didn’t want them sitting in the open and possibly absorbing moisture from the surrounding atmosphere.  Hopefully I got the timing right.

This bag contains about 500g (one pound) of fresh onions, dehydrated and ready to use.

 I tried eating one of the rings.  It still had the pungency of onion (although not as strong) and was amazingly sweet.

It might make a good snack to chase away colds!

Margaret J