Brummet's Conscious Blog

Dehydrating Garden Harvests Owning a small dehydrator can avert a great deal of kitchen food waste, and you’ll never have to pass up people offering you their garden extras again. Also, leftovers from meals can be easily dehydrated and used later for on-the-go situations like backpacking or snowshoeing.  After dehydrating any vegetable, use a blender, or grinder, to create a fine powder, and store in separate jars. Every year we dehydrate at least one jar each of chopped sweet peppers, hot peppers and ripe tomatoes.  If any recipe calls for chopped chilies or peppers, fresh or 'sun-dried' tomatoes, we can easily substitute with a dried version. We also have a jar of mixed vegetable powder; using a few teaspoons of this mixture in homemade stocks for more flavour or to help thicken and enrich stews and soups. Simply reconstitute powders by covering in a little boiled water for a few minutes. (Reserving any excess water to use as stock.)  Adding tomato powder to hamburger p...