Dehydrating Shredded Zucchini

In the past I have dehydrated zucchini by slicing it and then drying the slices to add to soups, etc. I have also sliced it thin and sprinkled seasoning on it and dried it to make "zucchini chips". They weren't bad, but they weren't something I wanted more of--maybe I didn't use the right seasonings--it's been a while, I really can't remember what I sprinkled on them. Might be worth experimenting with again. I've also frozen zucchini in 2 cup packets so I can make bread with it later, but freezer space is limited around here.

So this year I'm getting a little wild and I'm dehydrating shredded zucchini. Now in theory this should be able to be added to breads like fresh zucchini. Maybe you'd need a little extra liquid in your mix or maybe rehydrate the zucchini first? I've never tried it, but here's a recipe for zucchini-rhubarb bread using dried shredded zucchini from Mary Bell's Food Drying With an Attitude. Maybe you could substitute more zucchini for the rhubarb if you don't have it, or just use this recipe to figure out about how much liquid, etc. you need when using dehydrated zucchini instead of fresh. If anybody has experience baking with dehydrated zucchini, I want to know how it went!

Mary Bell's Zucchini-Rhubarb Bread

3/4 cup dried shredded zucchini
1/2 cup dried rhubarb flakes
1 1/4 cups water
3 eggs
1 cup butter, melted
2 cups sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp ground cloves
2 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups nuts, chopped

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

Grease two 7 by 3 inch bread pans.

In a small bowl, combine the zucchini, rhubarb, and water, stir, and let sit 30 minutes.

In a large bowl, beat eggs. Add butter, sugar, and vanilla and stir. Add rehydrated zucchini and rhubarb, cinnamon, ginger, and cloves. Stir again.

In another bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Add to egg mixture and blend well. Add nuts. Stir.

Divide batter into two prepared pans. Let sit 15 minutes before baking to allow flavors to mingle.

Bake 1 hour, or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Cool on wire racks.

So now we have that out of the way, here's how to dry your shredded zucchini. First you need a zucchini or two or three or however many your garden or friend gives you. (On a side note here, you know you don't have any friends if you have to buy zucchini during the summer.)

Then shred your zucchini using any method you want. You could peel it first if you want to, I left the skin on--it's kind of pretty that way. A food processor is really nice here. Mine is old and the lid doesn't latch right anymore, so it's kind of dangerous for shredding stuff. I still chop in it--I just have to hold the lid down while it's chopping, but shredding is not all that safe, and $35 for a cheapo new food processor just isn't in the budget, so if any of you are looking to offload a food processor, let me know and I'll give you my address to ship it to :)

Anyway, back to the procedure. I used a "salad shooter" we got a gazillion years ago and it shredded the zucchini without too much trouble. Next, put your shredded zucchini on your dehydrator trays. The less overlap you have, the less it will stick together at the end, however, it dries so crispy you can just kind of break it into bits after its dried anyway, so I didn't worry too much about having each strand separated from the next. In fact, I didn't worry about it at all. Just put the zucchini on the trays and kind of spread it evenly over the tray.
Dry at 125 degrees for about 5 hours. Here's the same tray after the 5 hours. Where did all the zucchini go? Crazy. Dehydrating is like magic.
On one tray I measured 2 cups lightly packed shredded zucchini and it came out to be a scant 1/2 cup of dried shreds.
The whole dehydrator full of zucchini shreds fit in a quart jar. Amazing. Into the food room it goes and someday when I'm feeling adventurous (after I've used all the frozen zucchini) I'll try it in bread. It could also be added to about anything you're cooking (ground beef, soups, etc.) just for some added nutrition. Use your imagination here.

14 Day No Shopping Challenge Results

Well, we've hit the end of our 14 days without going to the store and I learned a few things from the experience that I'll share, but I really suggest you try it for yourself and see what you learn as each of us has a little different situation, family size, taste preferences, preparedness level, etc. It really is best to try these things out while you can still correct mistakes and make changes and additions to your supplies!

The challenge went like this: Pick any 14 consecutive days in August and don't go to the store for any of your normal day-to-day things like food, toiletries, etc. See how you do.

We spent Aug 1st through the 10th on a camping trip in Colorado and I almost used that as the start of my 2 weeks, but there was no way I could get my family out there and back (10 hr drive each way) plus live out of a cooler for the whole time without at least restocking ice, so I opted to start when we got back. I did a standard shopping trip when I got home for things like milk, eggs, etc. Nothing out of the ordinary, and no crazy extra quantities of anything, then we started our 14 days of no shopping. Because I didn't think we'd have too much trouble with this challenge, I opted to throw a twist in for myself and do it without telling my family, just to see how "normal" I could keep things.

The first couple of days I started noticing items that were low like laundry soap and my favorite toothpaste and wondering if they would last the whole 2 weeks. Yeah, we have extra toothpaste, but it's sweet husband's favorite kind (it's cheaper, so I'm more inclined to buy extras of his than mine) and I could use it in a pinch, but you know how it is with your favorite toothpaste. I was not thrilled at the notion of running out and no, I didn't cut back on the amount of times I brushed my teeth to conserve!

I was also concerned with the milk and eggs supply as the chickens haven't started laying yet and I didn't think the amount of milk or eggs we had would be sufficient. We have powdered milk and powdered eggs, but I really didn't want to start using them unless it was entirely necessary. I cringed every time my kids asked for a glass of milk, thinking it would run out.

I had a few advantages going for me. We live in a crazy little town with one "greasy spoon" restaurant that I am not even tempted to go eat at, so I'm used to making dinner instead of picking up a rotisserie chicken or pizza (they just don't exist here). We also have a decent garden that helped with fresh produce, although not fruit.

We ran out of fresh fruit after about a week, so we ate canned fruit after that and nobody cared. The eggs lasted until day 12 and the milk actually lasted to the morning of day 15. The trick to getting the milk to last was making powdered drinks like lemonade, koolaid, etc that my kids wanted to drink instead of the milk. I also substituted powdered milk for fresh milk when I baked--just add the milk powder to your dry ingredients and then add water instead of milk with the wet ingredients. Like 1 cup of milk=3 T dry milk (non instant) mixed in with the flour/baking powder/etc., plus 1 cup of water mixed in with the oil, egg, etc. Make sense? It's really easy because you never have to actually reconstitute the milk. I could have made the eggs last longer if I had started substituting for them in the baking also (1 egg=1 TB gelatin dissolved in 3 TB hot water, stir it up a bit, then add to the recipe as an egg). I did end up doing a gelatin/egg substitution on the night of day 12 to make the cornbread muffins to go with our chili--worked great.

At the end of the 14 days we were still eating "regular" food. No crazy food storage substitutions (aside from the egg thing), soaking and cooking beans, wheat meat, etc. Our weaker area was toiletries and cleaners. The laundry soap lasted fine, but now I have the ingredients to make laundry soap in the event I run out. Toothpaste lasted also and I picked up a few extra at the store on day 15. I did run out of conditioner (day 12 also) which I thought I had more of in the food room, but alas it was only shampoo in there, so I borrowed from the camping gear and then found a bottle under the bathroom sink on day 15 that had been there all along. Still, one extra bottle will only go so long. I also ran out of dishsoap, so borrowed that from the camping gear also.

I noticed that I wanted sweets like I usually do, but had to get creative so I didn't use all the eggs baking cookies. Sometimes I just opted to do without, which is never a bad thing.

We had our anniversary dinner from the freezer (like I said, there's really no place to go out here anyway so me cooking our anniversary dinner is normal) and I made 2 birthday cakes during the course of the 2 weeks. Now, my son didn't get his first choice for his birthday dinner--I was missing an ingredient, but he did get his second choice and was perfectly happy.

Another thing that was interesting to note is that most of the "food storage" foods I have are raw ingredients that need prepared and put together to make a meal. This preparing of food takes time and effort. Figuring out substitutions also takes time and effort. I've often thought that during a real emergency, my schedule would be such that the kids wouldn't be going to piano, school, etc. and we'd have lots of time for preparing food, but would that really be the case? The more I thought, the more I decided I'd been deluding myself. In the event of an actual disaster type emergency, there will be so much to do to clean up/make the place safe/etc. plus the stress you'll be under that having at least a week's worth of EASY out-0f-a-can type meals that your family will eat would be very helpful. More would be better. An actual emergency will probably also bring with it loss of power, gas, and/or clean water, none of which I had to deal with during this experiment.

I think that's about it. It really worked out very well. Nobody suffered, in fact, nobody even noticed. But I learned a lot from doing it about some things I need to stock up on and some ways to make what I have last longer. So what's stopping you? Give it a try. 2 weeks of not shopping. See how it goes for you.

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Preparedness Challenges

I've been participating in a challenge from Preparedness Pro's blog to not hit the store for anything for 2 weeks during the month of August. We're almost done with it, and I thought I should have given you all a heads up about it before it started so you could join in, but alas, the no posting time and lack of coherent thinking this month led to it not getting posted about--sorry! I'll let you know how our 2 weeks went when we're done, but in the meantime, I thought I'd let you know about a 7 day preparedness challenge put together by the gals at Food Storage Made Easy. It will be happening sometime in September--check here for all the details. Should be fun! And if you sign up for it, make sure to put me as your referrer so we can both be entered to win a wheat grinder! :)

This type of challenge is one of the best ways to check your preparedness levels, so play along and see how you do and where you can improve.

Huh? Pure Powdered Sugar

A while ago I bought powdered sugar at our local store where the good brand (C&H) is more expensive than the cheap brand by a very large margin, so I was forced by my frugality to buy the cheap brand because I couldn't stomach the amount they were charging for the good stuff.

Now I remember why I get the good stuff (this is the other brand):
Could someone please explain to me how "PURE" powdered sugar contains sugar AND cornstarch? This made a noticable change in the taste of my favorite chocolate frosting today--very disappointing.

Only have to suffer through another bag and a half of this ick before I'm back to the real stuff. Or maybe I'll save the unopened bag for barter . . .

Bottled Meat Stroganoff

Here's one of my favorite bottled meat recipes. It is so fast and easy it's almost unworthy of a post of it's own, but seeing as school doesn't start for another week and archery season is on and I'm still doing laundry from the two camping trips, an easy post is all you get ;)

Remember the bottled meat? This could be any meat--I especially like deer/venison. Elk is good also--it gets a little softer in the bottle, where the venison holds a little firmer texture. I've seen people bottle beef before also--I have to buy beef, so buying it to bottle has never appealed to me when I can get a deer or elk during the hunting season and bottle that instead. I also really like a beef roast and beef steaks, where venison roast or steaks about make my stomach turn. So, long story short, you can bottle whatever meat you want, but for me, it's an especially nice way to preserve game meat.

So here's what you need for Bottled Meat Stroganoff:
1 pint bottled meat
1 beef bullion cube
2 cups (16 oz container) sour cream (more or less to taste)
a couple heaping spoonfuls of flour
noodles of your choice--I like the wide or medium egg noodles with this dish
A cup or two of milk to thin the sauce

Step 1: Put some water on to boil for your noodles.
Step 2: Scoop the sour cream in a separate pot and mix the flour into it so it's all creamy again.
Step 3: Add the whole bottle of meat including the juice and the bullion cube to the sour cream mixture and stir it up. Kind of break up the meat chunks as you stir it. Start the heat on the meat pot. If you like mushrooms, you could add some of those to the sauce also.
Step 4: Whenever your water boils, add your noodles and cook until they're done.
Step 5: As the meat mixture cooks and thickens, add some milk to make it the consistency you want. Salt and pepper it if you want also--I don't, but I kind of like things unsalted and unpeppered.
Step 6: (no picture, sorry--I was eating) You can mix the sauce into the cooked noodles, or serve the sauce over the noodles.

Sauce and noodles are generally done about the same time--15 minutes or so.

There you have it. Quick, easy, yummy bottled meat dinner :)

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The Best Part of Preserving Cherries

Okay, I have no words here except that this wasn't even half the mess my kitchen saw that day! I guess you just don't notice it so much when you're working with something light colored like peaches . . . oh yeah, and that was the best my hands looked all day.

Freezing Cherries

This is the third post in the Cherry series. Freezing cherries. This one won't take too long, it's pretty easy, but I'm trying to drag out a little information over the week, so freezing cherries got its own post.

When you have lots of cherries and not a lot of time, some things just have to wait. When we got all these cherries, I wanted to make fruit leather and dry some more cherries, but just didn't have the time to do it. Freezing the cherries made it so I can do something with them later. The frozen cherries will also be good for putting in ice cream, fruit smoothies, or any other recipe calling for fresh cherries.

First, wash your cherries. Seriously, if you've been following these cherry posts, these first couple of steps are going to look familiar.
Run the washed cherries through your cherry stoner. Mine is Back to Basics brand. You could probably skip this step, but I want my frozen cherries ready to use when they thaw out.
Next, put them in freezer bags and freeze them. I used my FoodSaver, and measured 2 cups of cherries into each pack so I know how much I have to thaw if I'm planning on using them in a recipe.
Lastly, label your packages and put them in the freezer. Yep, that's all there is to it. That was easy. Hope you're enjoying your week! I'm probably ready for a shower about now on my camping trip . . .

Dehydrating Cherries

Here's the second post in the cherry series coming at you through the magic of blogger scheduled posting while I'm camping.

Dehydrating Cherries is pretty easy, but does require that you have a cherry stoner unless you really want to cut the pits out of every cherry (NOT recommended unless you really have nothing better to do with your time, which I can't imagine).

Step one is to wash the cherries. Yep, that's the same wash the cherries picture from the canning cherries post.
Next you'll run the cherries through the handy dandy cherry stoner--mine is made by Back to Basics and clamps to the counter edge. The cherries go in one side, then you push the plunger and it pushes the pit out into a little container and the pitless cherry falls out the other side. It gets hung up every once in a while, but most of the time works pretty slick.
Next, cut your cherries in half and put them on your dehydrator trays so the cut side is up. This preserves the juice in the cherry as it dries.
Once the trays are full of little cherry halves, start the dehydrator. Depending on how large your cherries are and how humid your climate is, it takes from 13-20 hours to dry cherries.Dry them until they're like old raisins. Still sticky, pliable, not crispy, but not meaty.It took 2 1/2 trays of cherries to fill a quart jar. Dehydrating is like that. You do a lot of work and it ends up taking up very little space, which is good for storing lots of food, but not so good when you look at it and say, "I did all that work and that's all I have to show for it?" I was going to do some fruit leather with the cherries also, but the dehydrator was busy drying plain ol' cherries, so I froze a bunch to work with later.

I love to eat dehydrated cherries straight or put them in homemade granola type cereal. They are more tart than eating the cherry raw. They could go anywhere you would normally put a raisin, so cookies are fair game also. Yummy!