I've often enjoyed reading Get Rich Slowly, a wonderful blog about managing your money and living within your means. Recently they posted an article on how to use a food dehydrator that I thought would be good to pass along.
This weekend was Fathers Day (and a belated happy Fathers Day to all you fathers out there). My wife made a magnificent breakfast cake for our breakfast--warm from the oven, sweet and crunchy on top, moist and tasty on the bottom...it was like a hug on the taste-buds.
But now I have to wonder if it's going to become a tradition to make that cake only on Fathers Day. It would be easy to do. We tend to associate foods with special events more readily than with normal, run-of-the-mill days. You may not be able to remember that you made a specific recipe on a normal day during the year, but if it happened to be made on or for a holiday you can bet it will be remembered.
Part of me hopes this particular recipe will become part of our yearly Fathers Day celebration. I'd definitely have something to look forward to! But part of me hopes it doesn't, because one major downside to traditional foods is that they don't usually get made any other time of the year. While once a year is certainly better than never, it's not nearly as good as, say, four times a year.
Of course having something too often runs the risk of it not keeping its special nature. For example, a few years back we bought a new cookbook and started trying out recipes. One recipe we tried early on really stood out. It was quick to make and very tasty! Now we have it at least once a month. I still love it, of course, but it's lost some of its special-ness along the way. It's probably not the first thing I would think of if someone asked me what one special food I'd most like to have. I would most likely choose something that, while it may not taste any better, I get less often.
So there you have it. Don't eat something too often or too seldom. "Boy, that's a lot of help," I hear you saying.
I saw an ad in the newspaper yesterday from the Ball company. They're trying to introduce home canning to a new generation. I examine the ad "ad nauseum" over at our sister-site Simple Self Reliance:
"In spite of my usual cynicism toward advertising and products trying to
re-image themselves, I have to give them a thumbs up. Canning is in
danger of becoming a lost art, and if someone doesn't find a way to get
the younger generations interested again it will disappear with the last
of Aunt Eleanor's peaches."
Clumping part two: If you already have clumped spices don’t despair.
There are several ways to return them to a powder. (If the spice is more
than six months old I would throw it out. Pre-ground spices have a
shelf life of about six months before they start to really lose their
flavor. If they get humidified in the process they often turn rancid and
can make your food taste bad.)
If you happen to have a mortar and
pestle that is a great tool to use. If they are in a small bottle I
found you can usually pound them out with something slender like the fat
end of a chopstick. If that doesn’t work you can always go mechanical.
Small blenders, small food processors, and coffee grinders all work.
(Make sure you thoroughly clean your coffee grinder before and after you
try this, unless you want coffee flavored onion powder or onion
flavored coffee. J Some spice enthusiasts keep a coffee grinder or spice
grinder just for their spices.)
How to avoid clumping: Spices are usually dried and naturally don’t like
humidity. When they get too wet they often clump. This can cause them
to turn into hard little rocks that are almost impossible to use.
(Onion and garlic powders are notoriously bad for this.) Here are some
tips to avoid this. First make sure that you store them in a container
with a tight lid. Second if they are ingredients in a hot or warm dish
like soup, add them before you turn on the stove. (Steam clumps them
quickly.) The third and the best way to avoid this is to put them in
smaller bottles and use them up quickly. (If you buy large amounts of
spices for food storage keep a small bottle that you can refill for
cooking. This will also allow you the possibility of cleaning the bottle
between uses. Anything used often in cooking gets dirty after awhile.)
My daughter is into American Girls, which is just fine with my wife and I. We love the values those books and other products advance. An unexpected bonus, however, has been the American Girl magazine. A few sample issues came with an order we placed last year, and soon our daughter got a subscription for Christmas we enjoyed it so much.
One regular section is on fun food ideas that are quick and easy. At least two different issues have made a big hit in our home. One issue presented ideas for quick and tasty parfaits. We had to modify the recipes a bit for our vegan lifestyle, but that was easy enough. And the results were quite yummy! We now have these treats regularly as part of our weekly family night.
The other was some original sandwich ideas. They had ideas like Chunky Monkey, with peanut butter, banana slices, and chocolate chips, or another one with marshmallow cream and chocolate syrup (again we had to modify, but may have even improved on their recipe in the process). All of these taste surprisingly good on regular bread. These variations will occasionally pop up in the kids' lunches, too.
I can't wait to taste--I mean read--the next issue. They do an excellent job of showing how food can indeed be fun, something we adults tend to forget sometimes in our take-everything-too-seriously approach to things. And I know it makes my daughter feel good to be able to contribute something that the entire family enjoys. I am a definite fan of American Girl.
Use your nose! If you have a spice and don’t know if it will work in
your soup, sauce, etc. one of the best ways to tell if it will be good
is to smell them together. Usually I will stand over the pot/ pan/ bowl I
have the other ingredients in until I can smell them. Take the lid off
of the spice in question and smell both of them together without adding
any. If the smell is repulsive don’t add the spice. If they smell good
together go ahead and try just a small amount in the mixture. You can
almost always add more later if you decide you like it.
Taco Seasoning: Just like the Italian
spices the southwest flavor is created by a few complimentary spices.
There again you can add other spices than the ones I mention to give it a
different zest but these are the basics.
Onion powder
Garlic powder
Oregano
Ground Cumin (This is the key ingredient don’t try to substitute it
with anything else.)
Chili powder
Salt
Black pepper
Other ingredients you can try: cilantro, parsley (fresh is better for
this), red pepper flakes, cayenne pepper, lime juice, or lemon juice.
As a side note you may have noticed that I have abstained from using
specific amounts on any of my lists. That is because the amount depends
on the size of the dish. If you want specific measurements for something
you’re making feel to ask. Just tell me how many people you are cooking
for or how large the dish is.
Italian Spices: Whether you are making
marinara sauce, pizza sauce, or Italian style vegetables, the spices are
pretty much the same. Sometimes cooks will add another ingredient or
leave one out but you really can’t go wrong with this combination.
Onion powder
Garlic powder
Dried Parsley flakes
Italian Seasoning
Salt
Black Pepper
(If you use home canned tomatoes also add a little sugar to balance
out the bitter seeds. Fresh herbs can be substituted for any of the
herbs here and will improve the overall quality of the dish.)
My neice, a culinary arts graduate, has kindly allowed me to reprint her series of "spice tips" she's publishing on my sister's blog. Here's Spice Tip #1:
When preparing a savory dish, whether it be soup, meat, a sauce or even a
casserole, try adding onion powder and/or garlic powder. They both go
well with almost every savory dish and they go well with each other. (Do
not substitute these with onion salt and garlic salt unless you add
less salt to your recipe than it calls for or your food will be too
salty.) I like to put this combo on grilled chicken, hamburgers, sauteed
vegetables, and in my home made bread/ roll recipe. It works best to
add them with the wet ingredients of your recipe or when you first put
your meat on the grill. The flavors spread better when they are wet.
We've transplanted our strawberries and trimmed back our raspberries and blackberries. New growth is showing. Before we know it berry season will be upon us again. I can't wait! We've been fortunate to find some terrific species of raspberries and strawberries that produce for much of the growing season. We're usually still getting berries into October.
There's nothing quite like the taste of fresh, homegrown berries. Compared to our strawberries the grocery store strawberries taste like balsa wood dipped in Kool-aid. Of course ours tend to be smaller, but that's quite all right. I'd rather have a small bite of sweet, juicy, slightly-tart berry than a whole mouthful of woody, pulpy, almost tasteless mega-berry.
Our fruit "orchard" is going to be a nail-biter this year (we have four trees). The weather warmed up too early this year, and then took a dive back into the sub-freezing range the past few weeks. Our peach tree was already starting to bud, so now we're waiting to see how much damage the blossoms sustained. I won't mind a little. Last year we had to thin the tree considerably to keep it from breaking. But it'd be a shame if we lost most of the potential fruit.
Now is the time to start planning what to do with your produce. When it starts to ripen things will happen quickly, and you could find yourself overwhelmed if you don't already have everything you need. If you are planning to vacuum seal or dehydrate any food this year it may be a good time to buy the equipment you need and test it out a bit first. You don't want to be learning the best way to use your machine the same time you're up to your elbows in strawberries that could go bad soon.
Of course you'll want to plan to eat some, too. And to that I say, "Go for it!"
Several people have come to our site searching for information on using food dehydrators as yogurt makers. That got me thinking, and I did some research on the topic. The short answer is that yes, you can use your food dehydrator to make yogurt. You can also use your microwave, your oven, or even an electric heating pad to make yogurt. The real question is what options are suited for the task.
I can't say which is best, but certainly food dehydrators can be very useful, and potentially better suited to the task than your oven or a heating pad. There are a few caveats, however. Your dehydrator must have a thermostat to control the temperature, and the thermostat range must include the 108 - 110 degree Farenheit range, where yogurt cultures form. There must also be sufficient internal space to hold the containers you will be making the yogurt in.
With that in mind, I would recommend our Weston line of food dehydrators, such as the VegiKiln 6-Tray or 10-Tray models, or the Stainless Steel 10-Tray model if you're really serious. They come with a thermostat, providing a range from 84 - 155 degrees, which is more than sufficient. And since the trays can be taken out as needed, you should be able to fit yogurt containers of most any size you wish to try--and should be able to handle bigger batches than most yogurt machines.
Simply follow your favorite recipe, making sure your dehydrator is set to 100 degrees and is pre-warmed. At the point when you would put the mixture in the incubator you place it in the dehydrator instead. After the necessary time your yogurt should be done, and at least as well as a yogurt machine would do it.
I have to add a disclaimer that I have never tried this myself, but if a heating pad or microwave can work, surely a food dehydrator can. If anyone wants to try it and let me know how it goes, I'll be happy to publish your results!
One of the most common questions from people learning to store food is "but what do I do with it once I've got it?" For example, what do you do with dried apples slices besides eat them as a snack? Well, there's a site I found that has many recipes using food storage items. This page, for example, includes several recipes using dehydrated ingredients. So after you've found the rightfood dehydrator for you, learned how to use it, and have started storing dried foods, check out this site for some ideas!
I remember a quick hamburger soup my mom used to make using dried onions and dried carrots. Dried onions are especially useful in place of regular diced onion, so long as they have time to absorb some of the moisture. Or you can always soak them in warm water for awhile first to make sure they don't pull as much moisture from the other ingredients. That didn't matter so much in my mother's soup, of course.
What I remember most was the fact that it never mattered if we didn't have fresh onions on hand. If we did, we'd use them. If we didn't we'd just run down to the basement and get some dried onions from the storage. That alone probably saved us quite a bit of money in not having to make a quick run to the store just for onions.
Drying foods can be a real budget-stretcher, but be sure you know how you can use items before you start storing them.
Taxidrivermom over at The Knot in the Rope is discussing the demise of home cooking and the advantages we pass up by eating out:
"...the February 2010 issue of the Readers Digest notes that Americans
spend 37% on average of their food budget eating out. Home-cooked
meals are becoming less and less common in most households, and with
that the tastes of Americans seem to be changing as well. I can recall
when our school cafeteria served turkey or beef fricassee over real
mashed potatoes about once a week, along with fresh, hot dinner rolls,
jello, green beans and delicious chocolate cake. It was one of my
favorite menus because it reminded me of dinner at home."
She goes on to list some of the benefits of home cooking, such as better diet, lower food budget, lost weight, and more time with family. Read the whole thing, and then stick around and read some more. She's got a good site going that deserves support.
If you're like me, there are various items around your house that need to be disassembled from time to time for seasonal storage or just to get them out of the way until they are needed again. In my case it's my boys' bunk beds, my daughter's gymnastics bar, and the patio swing. For various reasons I completely or partially disassemble each from time to time, and end up with a set of bolts, nuts, and other small metal bits to keep track of until the next time they're needed.
Try vacuum-sealing them. It will keep all the pieces together in a neat little package that is tough enough to stand up to being dumped in a tool box, parts bin, or wherever you keep such parts. Unless the pieces are very heavy, it should even be sturdy enough to put a hole in and hang on a peg board. And while rust is not usually a concern, the parts will be air tight and waterproof. If you arrange and seal them well, it should even minimize wear from the pieces rubbing together while in storage. You can also write on the packaging in bold marker what the pieces are so that you or anyone else can identify them again.
The cost is not much more than the price of a zip-lock bag, and should be much more durable.
I remember during the anthrax scare after 9/11 when everyone was worried about anthrax and bio-chemical attacks. Duct tape and plastic sheeting flew off the shelves at Home Depot. People started stockpiling food. The government warned against panic and made stockpiling sound like a bad thing.
I think today they'd appreciate that much purchasing going on. But I digress.
My wife just returned from grocery shopping today and showed me a can of diced tomatoes. For the last several months they've been selling for $1 per can. But we had a stockpile, so she held off buying any in hopes the price went back down again. Today it did. That same can of tomatoes is selling for 87 cents now. Because of stockpiling we didn't have to buy any when the price was high. By purchasing more than you need when the price is low you can protect your budget against seasonal and cyclical pricing.
Hard economic times have everyone looking for new ways to save money. Coupon Sherpa has a Top Ten Grocery-Shopping Resolutions post that is worth a look. Some highlights that fits the Kitchen Riches lifestyle:
1. Make a Top-20 List: Comb your kitchen cupboards and the fridge to create a list of the top 20 products you buy most frequently. Research the standard unit price for each item and keep notes so you can spot a good sale when one comes along.
2. Stockpile: Keep an eye out for sales or coupons for your top-20 items and stockpile them while they're hot.
3. Don't buy pre-packaged meals: Cooking from scratch tends not only to be healthier but far less expensive. For example, compare the price of pre-chopped and cooked chicken to uncooked chicken breasts. Buy, cook, and chop many breasts at the same time and freeze what you don't need. Also works for pancakes, snacks, baked goods, etc.
I've found the first and second especially effective. We tend to stock up on items that are seasonal or subject to regular price cycles when the prices are low, allowing us to avoid buying when prices are higher. A 20-cent fluctuation on a bottle of applesauce may not seem like much, but it adds up. And when you do that with dozens of items it really adds up!
And when it comes to freezing...well, we have a few suggestions in that area.
It's January, which means the seed catalogs should start arriving any time now. The glum winter weather and the lack of significant holidays (no offense, Valentines Day, but you're nothing like Christmas!) makes it so easy to start dreaming of warmer weather and digging in warm, brown dirt. Gardening can not only be fun and stress-relieving, but in times like these, it can also help stretch the food budget that much farther. If you don't grow a garden, you might want to consider it.
The book that got us started was Square Foot Gardening, by Mel Bartholomew. This is a great book for organizing and maximizing your garden. You can grow much more than you think in all sizes of spaces--even apartment balconies. His watering recommendations are not universally accurate (we live in Idaho where it's much drier, and we found out the hard way our plants need more water than he recommends), but all-in-all, this is a great book!
One of the most rewarding plant purchases we ever bought were ever-bearing strawberries. Most strawberries will give you one crop in a year. These start producing fruit in April-May, and don't stop until October. All we have to do is rotate them to different spots of the garden every other year so they don't spend more than two years in any one spot. When we move them we find the newer plants and divide them up. Store-bought strawberries may be bigger, but the flavor of our home-grown strawberries blows them away. The store berries taste like lightly-sugared balsa wood by comparison.
The year after we moved into our current home we planted fruit trees. Fruit trees are the ultimate in patience gardening. Even though it's tempting to let the fruit grow, you should pick off any that form for at least the first two years. It can be a painful experience destroying what might otherwise be good fruit someday. However, the pay-off is worth it.
Last year was our first year we allowed fruit to grow. And grow they did! I had to thin them quite a bit or risk breaking branches. But even then we got loads of huge, juicy peaches, pears, and apples. And the taste! The first batch of peach cobbler was pure heaven! Home-grown tastes SO much better than store produce. I am really looking forward to this year's crop.
But it's still only January. For now I must be content to flip through the seed catalogs, plan the garden layout, and glance out the window occasionally...just in case a robin happens by.
Update: I was out browsing tonight and came across a little inspiration:
Our Christmas Eve tradition is to spend the evening with some family friends, one of which is from the same country as my wife. They put on as close to a traditional Christmas Eve celebration as they can, mostly for the benefit of the kids. One things we can always count on, however, is there being much more food than any of us can ever eat in three meals, let alone one. Though we bring several dishes to contribute, we invariably go home with more than we can with.
That usually means we spend the next week working our way through the leftovers--usually out of a sense of duty rather than because we want to. The food is good! Don't get me wrong! But the fact that we have to eat it before it spoils, and before we've really gotten over being over-stuffed from Christmas Eve, it really becomes a chore, no matter how good it is.
Then I realized we don't need to put ourselves through that. With a vacuum sealer we can save most of it in the freezer until we're ready to deal with it, say in late January when the mid-winter "blahs" set in and we could use a little Christmas. Not only will we be able to eat the food at a time when we'll be better able to appreciate it, but it can help bring back the warm memories of Christmas Eve with our friends.
It may also help reduce the amount of Holiday Weight I put on, which can't be a bad thing.
Someone has chosen our family for a modern "Twelve Days of Christmas" this year. We're not sure who it is, but every night for the last four nights someone has left something on our doorstep, along with a little poem.
Day One: "On the first day of Christmas we're dropping Christmas hints - And a candy cane treat bag full of chocolate mints! The 12 days of Christmas is a tradition we adore - So sit back and enjoy the gift, there'll be a eleven more!" This came with a bag of chocolate-covered mints.
Day Two: "On the second day of Christmas on your doorstep we did drop - two liters of our favorite soda pop." This was attached to a bottle of 7-Up Pomegranate.
Day Three: "On the third day of Christmas on your doorstep we did drop - three packages of popcorn to be popped." This came with three packs of microwave popcorn.
Day Four: "On the fourth day of Christmas to your doorstep we did lug - four quarts of apple cider in a great big jug." A gallon jug of real apple cider (not concentrate).
This is quite a lot of fun for us, as you can imagine. The kids are all excited to see what we get each night. We're also pretty impressed by how well they are able to get to our doorstep undetected every night. Granted, we're not actively trying to catch them (why ruin a good thing), but the way our house is laid out doesn't make it easy. All it would take is for one of us to be sitting on our couch looking out the window and they would have no way to get unseen to our door.
I certainly hope this is as fun for them to give as it is for us to receive. Probably more, as they get the thrill of the Mission: Impossible-style deliveries. The gifts are not extravagent--and don't need to be. Normal food, when given with love, become special--so special, in fact that we haven't been able to bring outselves to eat any of it yet! And family expriences around that food builds lasting memories. I know we'll never forget this. I should hope they--whoever they are--don't either.
When I was young my parents built a food dehydrator. It was a fairly simple design--little more than a big plywood box with sockets for four or five high-wattage light bulbs and a fan at the bottom and rails for seven or eight 1.5'x2' trays to slide in. The entire dryer stood about four feet tall. We kept it in the enclosed back porch, but even there the smell of drying food would work its way into the rest of the house.
Whether it was apples, bananas, carrots, or onions, it smelled good! It seemed we would have something drying practically around the clock from late August to early November every year. It also made the porch that much warmer in cooler weather.
At the time I never really thought about why we were drying food. Our family was on the high-side of poor, but we kids never knew it. Perhaps that was because we never wanted for anything important. Our parents both came from frugal farm families who knew how to get the most out of everything. We gleaned potatoes from local fields. We bought apples in bulk from a local orchard. We bottled tomatoes, pears, peaches, and applesauce. We made jam in a dozen varieties. Our parents knew how to buy cheap and preserve it.
The food dryer was a big part of that. It still sits on my mother's porch today, though I doubt it's seen much use in years. But the memories and the lessons remain. Helping with the family food storage was work, but it's work I look back on fondly. More importantly, I learned how to do it myself, which has been a tremendous help in our current economy. My parents were born during the Great Depression. Thanks to them I learned some things to help us through the "Great Recession". Not the least of these is that the family food dehydrator does much, much more than leave the house smelling good.
