Saving Seeds: Radish

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Dehydrated Baby Food: Sweet Potato, Pumpkin, Squash

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Bottling or Home Canning Carrots

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Make Your Own Dehydrated Baby Food

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Dehydrating Celery

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Dehydrating Carrots: Steam Blanched or Not

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Chioggia Beets

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Dehydrating Frozen Broccoli

Frozen vegetables are perfect for dehydrating.  They've already been blanched prior to being frozen and you can usually just dump them out on your dehydrator tray frozen and start drying.  Super easy.  This weekend I dried some broccoli.  Broccoli is kind of large and thick straight out of the bag, so I let it sit on the counter and thaw a bit, then cut each larger chunk into 2-4 smaller pieces.  You'd want it smaller anyway when you're going to eat it, and exposing the center of the stalk makes it dry faster.

I loaded them on the dehydrator trays.  One big 56 oz (3 lb. 8 oz.) bag of broccoli florets filled three dehydrator trays.  Then I put the trays in the dehydrator.  Because of the bulk of the floret heads, I loaded the trays every other slot in my Excalibur dehydrator.  This is one of the benefits of this particular design of dehydrator--you can stick your trays in wherever you need to to accommodate whatever it is you're wanting to dry.

Then I ran the dehydrator overnight.  I didn't count the hours, but I wanted the broccoli good and dry.  They should be crispy, not leathery.  Here they are when they're done.  That empty spot is where hubby snitched one.  He likes to try out the dehydrated goods right off the tray.  These were "tasty, but the stem is pretty tough" in case you were wondering.

There you have it.  Super easy.  That whole giant bag filled three pint jars once it was dried.

And another shameless plug--I'm a dealer for the Excalibur dehydrators.  Let me know if you're interested in one.  I'll have a page up to order at some point, but in the meantime, just send me an email and I'll get you pricing.

Fabulous Homemade Canned Salsa

I was going to write something fantabulous about Christmas or winter or something, but to be honest, my brain's about done, so I'm pulling out the Salsa post I've been wanting to write.  It's kind of Christmasy because some people I love are getting some of my salsa as gifts this year.  There you go.  A Christmas post after all. :)

To make salsa, you need a good recipe.  If you don't have one, don't worry, I'll share mine.  Salsa is a staple around here, at least for my husband and son who like spicy stuff.  The ingredients are easy to grow in your garden, and if you don't grow them in your garden, they're pretty easy to find at the market.

Here's the magical salsa recipe:

For every 1 quart tomatoes add:
1 onion
1 Bell pepper (or equivalent other mild pepper)
1 jalepeno pepper (or equivalent other hot pepper)
1-2 cloves garlic (optional)

Boil until thick, skimming juice, then add:
1/4 c. vinegar
1 tsp salt
1 TB sugar

Just before canning add:
1/8 tsp oregano
1/8 tsp ground cumin
dash cayenne pepper (optional)
Cilantro (1-2 bunches/10 quarts tomatoes)

Process 10 minutes in your boiling water canner.

Now, for the step by step.  First you need some tomatoes.  Growing your own is vastly superior to buying them at the store for cost and quality, but do what you can.  The good thing about this recipe is that it can be made with a few tomatoes or a lot of tomatoes.  However many tomatoes you have, that determines how much of the other ingredients you'll need. 

If your tomatoes are romas, wash them and cut the stem end off.  You don't need to peel them because their peels don't separate when they are cooked.  If they are another variety, follow the first few steps in the canning tomatoes post (up to getting the tomatoes peeled).

Wow, missing a few pictures here.  Anyway, after your tomatoes are prepped, pop them in your food processor and chop them to the desired consistency.  Measure as you pour it out of the food processor and into the pot.  The pot needs to be one that doesn't burn stuff again.  I like my pressure canner pot.  It's huge, so I can do a big ol' batch of salsa plus it has never burned anything I've cooked in it.

Next add the peppers.  One bell pepper and one jalepeno pepper for each quart of chopped tomatoes.  I usually have about 12 quarts of tomatoes, so I add 12 bell peppers.  Core them and get all the seeds out.

Then pop them in your food processor (yours is probably nicer than mine--I got mine from my mom when she got a new one--I'm pretty sure it's 50 years old, but she says it's probably only 30). 

And proceed to chop them to bits:

Add the pepper chunks to your pot of chopped tomatoes.

Now, if you like your salsa hot, go ahead and chop and add the whole amount of hot peppers.  If you don't, add about half that much and work up from there after it's cooked for a bit and you can taste the hotness.  I'm just shortening your learning curve here.  Peppers from the store are not nearly as spicy as peppers from my garden.  One year I didn't grow jalepenos, so I bought some from the grocery store.  I used 1 1/2 peppers per quart of tomatoes and it was perfect hotness for me.  The next year I grew my own jalepenos.  I put in 1 1/2 jalepenos per quart of tomatoes just like the year before and when I went to taste it before canning it, it was so hot my throat tried to swell shut.  I about cried.  I didn't know what to do with that giant pot of salsa I'd been working on all day.  I just wanted to throw it away and go cry myself to sleep (must've been one of those days, but I vividly remember how I felt when it was so much too hot).  Anyway, sweet husband came home before I got so crazy as to throw it all out and he tried it and declared that it was perfect, so I canned it all up and he ate it.  Thankfully I got another round of tomatoes and I did a mild salsa batch with it that year.  So since then, I've stuck to the "half the hot peppers rule" and I'll add more at the end if it's not hot enough.  It's worked out pretty well.

Another thing about working with hot peppers is that the pepper oil gets on your skin.  I did not know this when I first made salsa.  I cut the jalepenos and cored them by hand without gloves.  Yeah, dumb.  Don't do it.  My hands suffered chemical burns and I had to wear rubber gloves to take my contacts out that night so I wouldn't burn my eyes.  Now I wear gloves and just cut the tops off the hot peppers and throw them in the chopper without coring them.  I know they're hotter that way, but really, the less I have to contact them the better for me.

This year we didn't have jalepenos, but I had LOTS of these other hot peppers, so I used those instead.  Turns out they are so hot that half the hot peppers was still too much.  Ugh.  Another pot of salsa for sweet husband this year.

When the peppers are in the pot, add the onions.  Quarter them and put them in the food processor and chop them to bits.  I figure about 1 medium onion per quart, so if I have giant onions or smallish onions, I adjust the number accordingly.  If you're adding the garlic, toss them in with the onions so they'll chop up nicely.  My food processor doesn't like chopping a few small things, it likes to have some volume to work with.

You  might open the window when you're chopping the onions.  Really.  Put the chopped onions in the pot with the peppers and tomatoes.  It should look something like this:

Yummy.  Now let it boil down.  Stir it occasionally so you know how thick it really is because the juice comes to the top and the chunks kind of sink, so you might get it boiled down too far if you're not stirring and checking the consistency.  If you used romas, it won't need to boil as long because they don't have as much juice.  Romas are really the way to go.  I just didn't grow any this year.

When it's boiled down to salsa thickness (however runny or thick you like your salsa) add the vinegar, salt, and sugar.  We tried a little something different this year and substituted lime juice for the vinegar.  You CAN substitute lime or lemon juice for vinegar in a salsa recipe, but you cannot substitute vinegar for lime or lemon juice because the vinegar is less acidic and you need a certain level of acidity to make the salsa safe.

Then add the oregano, cilantro, cumin and cayenne pepper if you want it (I leave the cayenne out).  My crazy little store didn't have cilantro on my salsa day, so I used dry cilantro.  Not quite as good as dried herbs usually aren't, but it worked.  Thanks to my mom for bringing me a whole bunch of cilantro that she grew and dried in her dehydrator so I have some for emergencies like this.

You can taste your salsa once everything is in it--take a spoonful out and put it on a little plate or bowl and let it cool down.  If it's not hot enough, chop up a few more peppers.  If it's too hot, send it to my husband, he'll eat it.  Seriously, you could make more salsa without the hot peppers in it and mix the two together or something like that if you wanted to salvage your too hot salsa.  I briefly considered that when I made that one crazy hot batch, but I didn't have any more tomatoes at the time, so I thought I'd cry instead.  Crazy girl.

After it was all in the pot and I was happy with the flavor, I heated up the boiling water canner and a little pot with lids and filled the pint jars with salsa.

Wipe the rims, apply the lids, put the jars in the canner and process for 10 minutes.  Voila.  Salsa.  Yummy delicious too-hot-for-me salsa.  :)  I tried bottling it in quarts once (process 20 minutes), but we didn't use it fast enough once it was opened, so we've stuck with pints.

Contrary to canning tomatoes, this is definitely cheaper than buying salsa and much better tasting than any store salsa I've found.  When I don't make it too hot that is.

Canning Tomatoes

Today we have another flashback to summer post.  Canning tomatoes.  I was going to do salsa, but the first steps of salsa are the same as canning tomatoes, so we really need to cover canning tomatoes first. 

Canning tomatoes starts with getting some tomatoes.  Really not cost effective to buy your tomatoes at a grocery store, maybe at a farmer's market.  But it's for sure cost effective if you grow your own or get them from a friend that planted 100 tomato plants and has "a few" extra tomatoes (really, that's where I got most of mine this year).  Wash the little guys off.

If you grow your own or get free tomatoes, there will probably be some with imperfections like bruises, scrapes, black spots.  That's okay.  We'll just cut those off and use the rest of the tomato.  By the way did you notice my nice stainless steel sink?  It's not mine.  I canned tomatoes at a friend's house.  Canning really goes much quicker and is quite enjoyable if you do it with a friend.  You'll see her nice stove and countertop also.  Makes for good pictures. :)

Get a pot of water boiling.  After your tomatoes are washed, put them in the boiling water a few at a time.  I have a really cool wire basket thing that holds my tomatoes while they're in the pot then I can lift them all out at once--saves lots of time over fishing out individual tomatoes.

After they've boiled for a little bit (a minute or so I think) their skins will start to crack.  Now they're done and they need to be taken out and put in a sink of cold water.  See the cracks?

When they've been put in the cold water, it's time to core and peel them and cut off any bad parts you didn't already get rid of.  If the bad part isn't too big, I just let it stay on the tomato until I get to the core/peel stage.  Then I have a knife handy and just do all the cutting at once.  It also helps the tomato stay together in the boiling water if you don't have chunks cut out of it.

Coring is pretty easy.  Get a sharp knife and cut a cone shape out around the stem or where the stem used to be.  That's it.

If the tomato is ripe, the skin will slip off easily.  If it's not ripe, you'll have to help it out with your sharp knife a little bit.  This one was nice and ripe.

Now we've got our tomatoes peeled, it's time to decide in what form you'd like to bottle them.  I usually cut mine into little pieces.  You can bottle them whole, sliced, chunked or pureed.  We pureed these.  Popped them in the blender after they were peeled and then poured the blended tomato into a pot.  She doesn't like chunks.

Use a good thick pot for heating your tomatoes--I use my standby pressure canner pot because it doesn't burn anything.  I've used a cheapo pot and burned the tomatoes to the bottom.  Ick.  I canned them anyway--that was 10 years ago and I just yesterday emptied the last 3 pints of burnt tomatoes so I could use the jars for something else.  Really if you burn the tomatoes, you probably will not want to use them and they'll hang around your food storage room for 10 years like mine did.  Your call.  You could save yourself all that trouble by using a nice thick pot that doesn't burn stuff.

Heat up your lids.  Really, it used to be that this wasn't so important--I used to put lids on jars cold all the time.  But the lid manufacturers have gotten cheap and are not putting as good of gummy stuff on the lids and it really needs to be heated or it won't stick to the jar right away and your liquid will leak out while your stuff is canning.  Just my theory, but it's backed by lots of my own kitchen evidence.

After your tomato pot is nice and hot (like boiling for a while) and you've skimmed off any extra juice you want to get rid of as well as foam (this pureed stuff foamed, I don't remember my chunked tomatoes foaming), it's ready to go in jars.  Put 1 T lemon juice and 1 tsp salt in each quart jar, then pour the tomatoes in to fill it up.  Wipe the rims, apply the lids and rings and put it in your water bath canner for 30 minutes.

When it's done canning, pull the jars out and let them cool off.  This stuff is great for chili and soup base or whatever you use canned tomatoes for.  Yummy yum yum.

NOTE FOR ROMA TOMATOES: If you have roma tomatoes, you can skip the whole boil and peel section.  Their skins don't separate, so they can just be washed, cut the stem end off, and cut them as desired and put them in the pot to heat up.  They also are a "thicker" or "meatier" tomato--not so juicy, so you won't have to skim much juice while it's boiling.  Romas are awesome.  Especially for salsa.  But alas, romas weren't free this year, so I didn't can any. :)

P.S. Have you entered the giveaways for the herb seeds and the foodsaver yet?

Freezing and Dehydrating Corn: Choose Your Own Adventure

You know I could post this as two posts, but the only difference between freezing and dehydrating corn is the last step, so for simplicity I'm just doing one post with two possible endings.  Kind of like the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books.  You read those didn't you?  I really liked the original #8 if I remember right.  I figured out how to get through the wild west town, I believe it was Deadwood City, without dying and then just chose the same adventure every time I read it so I never died.  Yep, I'm that adventurous.  Anyway, back to corn.

First thing you'll need is a bunch of corn.  However much is fine.  Depending on the variety of corn you grew, it can lose it's sweetness pretty quick after it's picked.  There's an old saying that goes something like "don't pick the corn until the water's boiling".  That never works around here, so we just get what we get when we get it.  It's also best for flavor to pick your corn first thing in the morning or late in the evening, not the middle of the day.  Ummm, yeah.  I pick it after I get the kids to school.

Shuck your corn and wash off all the little stringy corn silks as best you can.  Some folks are real particular about getting the strings off (me) and some don't really care much about getting every little string (my kids).  Then boil up some water and blanch the corn on the cob by dropping it in the boiling water for 6-8 minutes.  Mine didn't want to stay down so I put a bowl on top of it to keep it in the water.  (this new blogger typing thing is going to take some getting used to)



Pull the corn out of the boiling water (I use tongs) and put it into some cold water.

Once it's cooled off, you can cut it off the cob.  There are some fancy tools out there to get the corn off the cob.  I'd like one.  I just use a knife and cut down the cob in strips.  I do it on a cookie sheet so it will kind of hold the cut corn kernels and I can get a pile of them before moving to the next step.  Don't cut too deep or you get nasty tough cob bits in your corn.

Now you have your corn cut off.  If you'd like to store it in your freezer, continue reading.  To dehydrate it and store it on a shelf, scroll down a little more.  (You won't die with either choice, I promise.)

FREEZING:

Scoop the cut corn into freezer bags or vacuum seal bags in a quantity that looks like one meal's worth for your family.  A little less for a couple, a bunch for a big family.  Or you can measure and do each bag at about 2 cups and have around a pound of corn per pack.  Whatever works for you.  Seal your bag, sharpie your date on it and put it in the freezer.  Easy.

DEHYDRATING

Put your cut corn on your dehydrator trays and dry until it's hard and crispy.  Remove and store in a jar, vacuum pack bag, bucket, whatever you like to use to store your dehydrated goods.  Mark the date on it.

This dry corn is for rehydrating in soups and whatnot, not for grinding into cornmeal.  If you want to dry corn for cornmeal, just let it dry on the cob without doing any blanching like this.

There you have it.  Choose Your Own Adventure #379: Corn ;)

Drying Corn

I planted some corn this year that was supposed to dry and be ground for cornmeal. I didn't read that it has a 110 day growing season, which we barely have here, and I didn't plant it right at the beginning of the season, so when it wasn't dry by the first hard frost, I called my extension agent who told me it was okay to leave the ears on the stalks through the frost. So I did. Then a couple of weeks later, I pulled the ears off the stalks and pulled the shucks back to expose the corn kernels which STILL were not dry. It was really cold that day, so I just tossed all the ears in the wheelbarrow and drove them to the shop where they could stay "inside". However, they weren't going to dry all piled on each other, and the shop gets pretty darn cold which is not conducive to drying corn ears. I knew the ears had to come in the house where it was warm enough for them to dry, but there's quite a few of them and my house is only so big (well, actually it's pretty darn small), and the places I'd like to have a bunch of corn hanging around are even more limited, so you know that saying, "Necessity is the mother of invention"? Well, I took some clothesline and strung it from nail to screw to nail to different nail to another screw that were already sticking out of the rafters in my furnace/freezer/storage room in sort of an ADHD spiderweb pattern. Really random--I just didn't feel like pounding my own nails in to make it all nice and neat. Then I clothespinned the ears of corn to it. Now they are happily drying in my storage room using space that I didn't have anything else in (and I thought there was no such space in my house).
Okay, that picture kind of stinks if you haven't been in my storage room--hopefully you can make it out. The corn is really dark red--it's called Bloody Butcher corn. Don't you think RED cornbread or RED corn tortillas will be fun?

Pickled Hot Peppers and my Attempt at Plumbing

Pickled Hot Peppers. Sorry, it doesn't even sound appetizing to me, but sweet husband likes them on his sandwiches and we had an abundance of hot peppers in the garden this year, so as I'm contemplating what I'm going to do with them, he suggests slicing them and canning them for sandwiches. Sure. Sounds easy enough I suppose. Well, after getting it done, I wouldn't really recommend it, but you're welcome to learn from my experience and try anyway. So here's how it went.

First, a friend and I picked all the hot peppers from the garden (it was going to freeze, so they had to get out of the garden anyway) and I washed them. Aren't they lovely? Peppers are much better to look at than to eat.
These are Bulgarian Carrot Peppers and Georgia Flame Peppers. They look pretty much the same as each other--green when immature and dark orange when fully ripe, about 3 inches long and hotter than all get out. I was going to bottle them separately and see which was better, but didn't manage to keep the two varieties separated during the chopping process, so they're all mixed up in the bottles now.

Next I got a pot and mixed up the pickling mixture:

5 cups vinegar
1 cup water
4 tsp canning or pickling salt
2 TBSP sugar
2 cloves garlic smashed


Heat it to boiling and simmer for 10 minutes, then remove the garlic and discard. I ended up using 4 times this recipe by the time I was done. Also got the boiling water canner warming up and a little pot to heat lids in.

Have you ever been in a kitchen with boiling vinegar? Definitely cleans out the sinuses.

So while the vinegar solution was heating up, I put on my rubber gloves, chopped the tops off the peppers and cored them with a potato peeler (bottom right in the picture). You don't have to core them if you don't want to, but sweet husband doesn't like the cores on his sandwiches, only the peppers, so ours got cored. He actually did this bowlful of peppers while I took the kids to their soccer games. Kind of like a bouquet of peppers.

Now, here's where I quit taking pictures as things got a little interesting. Once the peppers were cored, we needed to slice them up, so I first tried using my salad shooter. It sliced a few and then quit working. Meanwhile I am having intermittent coughing attacks from the peppers being chopped. I do not like peppers. They do not like me. I decided this should be an outside job in the future.

My little gal came in to tell me something and had her hand on the counter while she was talking, then after she left the room her eye started hurting--I determined it was pepper juice from the countertop, so she got the burning eye wash on screaming child treatment and felt much better. After that, the kids were banned from the kitchen, and I was sure everything I touched or the peppers were even close to was contaminated with burning pepper juice. Hence, no pictures. I didn't want to take the gloves off or contaminate my camera by using it with the pepper gloves on.

I still needed to chop the peppers, so I got out my dangerous food processor that the lid doesn't latch down and sliced a few in there, but it kept getting peppers caught between the slicing blade and the lid and then it wouldn't slice anymore, but just spun around with peppers caught in it. About this time, sweet husband offered to put the kids to bed so I could get these peppers finished before tomorrow morning.

Then I remembered I had the slicer attachment for my Kitchenaid, so I got that out. I've never used it before. Turns out the blades are not very sharp on it--in fact not at all sharp, so it just kind of peeled the pepper meat off the skins, turning it into mush and left the skins spinning around between the blade and the pusher. So after exhausting all my automatic pepper slicing options, I was left with the good old fashioned knife and cutting board. This went along fairly well until I cut a hole in one finger of my glove and pepper juice got on my finger and burned it. I donned a new glove and went about slicing like a crazy chef lady until I was almost finished and as I cut, pepper juice squirted up right in my eye! I peeled off one glove and ran to the bathroom and did an eye flush in the sink for I don't know how long. Amazingly, when I was done, my contact was still in. Weird. I went back to the kitchen and decided the few peppers that were still in the bowl could just go to the chickens. I was done with peppers.

I put the sliced peppers in the jars and poured the hot vinegar solution over them leaving about 1/2 inch headspace. Wiped the rims and put on the hot lids and put the jars in the canner. After 10 minutes in the boiling water canner, the peppers came out looking all pretty and harmless. I put them on the rack to cool and after repeating the process for a second batch of jars, went about cleaning up the kitchen.

While I was cleaning up, my garbage disposal quit working and with little pepper bits floating around in my sink from washing all the chopping equipment, the sink quit draining. Now I have a sink about a third full of water with pepper bits in it and can't get it to drain, and somewhere in my brain I remember in another house when the disposal quit working there was a little tool you could use to unjam it. So I look under the sink and miraculously there is a little allen wrench looking tool between my grocery sack collection and the pile of rags and random cleaners I never use. I find a place the tool might fit on the disposal, stick the tool in and pull on it. Just as I think I'm loosening something up, the whole disposal comes off the bottom of the sink with a bang and a scream (that was me) and all the water with pepper bits in it is all over under the sink and on the kitchen floor. I was amazed at how fast I threw towels at the mess considering how late it was and how tired I was. Nobody woke up. I reattached the disposal and cleaned up some more. I took a picture to preserve the moment. ;) Then continued cleaning and sanitizing the entire kitchen so it was safe to walk into and make breakfast in the next morning.

Sweet husband figured out how to unjam the disposal--I had the right tool, I just used it in the wrong place.

I hope the peppers are good. I'm sure not trying them. I'll say again, I don't like peppers, but they sure are pretty to look at.

Now, if you choose to try this, here's a few warnings:

WEAR RUBBER GLOVES, safety glasses, respirator, heck, maybe a whole chem suit while you're working with hot peppers--serious chemical burns can result if your hands are not protected. We actually wore latex gloves--they are not the same thing as rubber gloves--the pepper oil can get through the latex gloves somehow. Strange but true. Keep the gloves on while you clean up--I didn't do this and ended up burning my hands and arms AFTER the sink ordeal.

Even if you think you don't have pepper contamination on you, don't go touching your eyes or sensitive areas! You'll probably end up burning yourself.

DO NOT LET YOUR CHILDREN HELP when you're slicing peppers. Don't even let them in the room!

Just buy sandwich peppers, it's easier.

And leave the plumbing to the plumbers.

(Hot Peppers Part 2 Here)

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.