Merry Christmas Eve Eve!!!!! hahahaha I hope that you had a good night of refreshing rest. I did and I needed it. haven't slept well for a couple of nights, but I kinda made up for it last night. yay!!!!! I had chatted thru text msgs yesterday with a sweet friend of mine that lives in Arizona and she was having rain. I got up to rain this morning. I don't know when we'll get to take our walk today. we'll have to watch the weather app and see when it clears on out. I'm kinda up for a slow day with nothing really pressing. I may start on some finger foods for our Christmas Day feast.
I may also make some Gibbor Treats too. I'll have to explain this sometime, but it's a fun thing that my friend in Arizona and I have started doing. it's fun and yummy!!! we get to have fun coming up with other treats while our husbands have fun devouring them. we'll see what happens today.
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I just seen something a little while ago that said "if you believe in nothing else, always believe in yourself". I'm sorry to tell you, but "self" can never be believed in. especially me, my"self". I've never done anything to be believed in, but I know who has. that who is Jesus Christ!!!!! believe in Jesus Christ!!!!!!! believe in what he has done for you!!!!!! question: what have you done for you? answer: nothing but sin and shame is what you've done. it's what we've all done. so if you see that and you're inclined to believe it, just don't. because you've not done anything to boast and believe in yourself. if by chance, you've done something, trust me, it's because it was God-ordained!! it wasn't you. it was Him, even if you don't know Christ, it was still God working thru you. nothing else. so, if you're inclined to believe in yourself, get over it. believe in Jesus and make it official. accept Him as your Lord and Savior today and then you'll really have someone to believe in!!!
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let's do a "2 minutes in the kitchen with me" this morning. this is one of my last dehydrating projects for the year. I had 3 bags of cranberries to get dehydrated. they were 12 oz bags. kinda ticks me off that we pay more for the 12 oz bags than we ever paid for 16 oz bags, but that's the way it is. pay more for less. that's the name of the game. but I digress.
this is a little over 2 lbs of cranberries to start off with and all of them finally dehydrated fill these 2 jars with enough shake room. the jars are 12 oz jars, I believe. at any rate they shrink down nicely and look beautiful in my jars. I have about 15 or 16 bags of cranberries dehydrated and ready for use. I'm really excited about that too.
I'll be making powder from the most of these. I'll put the cranberries, orange slices and monkfruit sweetener in my nutribullet and make powder with them. then I can use the powder in just about anything I want to and it will give it an awesome flavor. think drop cookies, pancakes, waffles, fruit crumbles and my morning breakfast, which I'll show you in another picture.
the next pic is of lemons. well, this is just one lemon. I hope you can see just how thinly sliced it actually is. I have 2 mandolines and I used the one that made the thinnest slices without having to change the settings on my big mandoline. the one I used slices very thin and that's what I wanted. slicing thin will help it dehydrate quickly. once it's completely dry. "cracker crisp, bone dry and rock hard" is my criteria. it has to meet one of those 3 criteria before it comes off my dehydrator.
a lot of people will take their dehydrated goods off the dehydrator, hoping it's dry enough and then they'll have to put it back on because it wasn't dry enough or they'll lose a jar to mold. when you lose a jar of hard work to mold, you'll quickly learn something or you'll do it again.
I didn't have to lose but one jar, and that was one jar too many. but it did teach me a valuable lesson. I'll not settle for "hoping" it's dry enough. It WILL be dry enough when I take it from my dehydrator, or it stays on there till it IS dry enough.
when I drop something in a jar, it needs to clink like I'm dropping pennies in it. when I shake the jar, it needs to sound like it's got pennies in it.
one more thing about dehydrating citrus or anything else for that matter is that temperature matters. when you do things by trial and error like I've always done, you learn a lot. some of my produce and citrus turned dark early on. it's still perfectly fine to use, it's just dark. dark enough that you wouldn't recognize it as citrus.
the time it takes to dehydrate doesn't mean anything. because it's not dehydrated till it's dehydrated. so time means nothing. if you have to reset your dehydrator, reset it. it won't be safe to take off anything till it meets the criteria of "cracker crisp, rock hard, and bone dry". so don't worry about time. when I turn my dehydrators on I set the timer as high as it will go and walk away. one is 48 hours and one is 24 hours. so I just reset as necessary, till my produce meets my criteria.
thru trial and error, I learned that it was the natural sugars and starches in the produce and citrus that was turning dark because the temps was too high. any and all instruction manuals and recipe books and how to's will always give you the temps and times. I had to learn the hard way that the people writing these instructions and recipe books don't know squat about dehydrating. if they did, they would know that 145 degrees for 6 hours won't get anything dehydrated!!!!!!! still yet, they keep writing crap and people keep buying their crap and said people keep losing valuable product based on those flawed instructions.
like I said earlier, one jar loss of hard work was more than enough for me. so when I got an adjustable temp dehydrator, that was the very first thing I started doing is trying to find the perfect number for me to get the results I was after. and I did just that.
I don't EVER set my dehydrators, either one of them, over 115*f, that's as high as it ever gets. and most of the time it's actually set at 110*f. at those temps, nothing ever loses it color. the natural sugars and starches retain their beautiful colors.
and then we have time. the manuals have unrealistic times. each one of us have our own set of variables that we are dealing with when we dehydrate. freshness of the produce, thickness of the slices, and the main thing is ambient humidity in your home. those are the 3 main variables.
freshness of produce: if it's just picked and fresh it's moisture content will be higher and that naturally tells me that it will take a little longer than something that's not fresh. 2 or 3 day old produce will not have as high a moisture content. so if you have some stuff in the fridge that's getting some wrinkles on it; but NOTHING rotten; then that's perfect to put on your dehydrator. believe it or not, it will dehydrate quicker.
thickness of slices: I have learned that when I slice my produce or citrus, if I can slice it as thin as I can, it will dehydrate faster. thick slices can develope "case hardening". that's where the outside dries and forms a hard shell like casing on the outside, while the inside remains wet and will never dry. we may think it's dry and jar it up and come back to a jar full of mold, simply because it was still wet on the inside.
that situation is where my "cracker crisp, rock hard and bone dry" criteria came from. for slices, don't ever assume they are dry just by looks. pick up several slices and bend them. if it breaks and nothing is damp, wet or sticky inside the slice, then it's good to jar up. if it bends or if you feel damp wet or sticky, keep it on the dehydrator.
ambient humidity in your home: we all live in different areas with different humidity levels. our homes have different humidity levels in them. so we have to take that into consideration. what may take me a short time to dehydrate may take you a longer time because of the humidity in your house and vice versa.
so we have at least 3 things to take into consideration when dehydrating. and I'm sure there are many more situations. like where your dehydrator is sitting at and how close it is to a frequently used water source such as your kitchen sink and just things like that.
once your produce or citrus gets completely dry, start jarring it up immediately. don't let it set in the ambient humidity of your home for very long at all, because it will start rehydrating from the ambient humidity pretty quickly. especially some of the produce that is mostly liquid anyway. my potatoes and squash and peppers, things like that, don't readily take up the humidity in the air. but tomatoes, citrus, melons and other items will. they tend to pretty hydrophobic, meaning they are looking for moisture and will absorbe it.
also, do not dehydrate outside!!! I see people all the time telling others to set their dehydrator out side to use it!!!!! please stop telling others to do that!!!!! you may live in a very dry and arid place. that's wonderful for you!!!! but most of us don't!!! looking at my outdoor humidity it's 89% right now. even in the summer time, in the heat of the summer, no rain at all, just heat, I can still have a humidity of 89% outside. thankfully, I've been dehydrating long enough to know that I CAN NOT dehydrate outside and a lot of the newbies haven't learned that. so just do us all a favor and stop telling others to set their dehydrators outside. not to mention dealing with ants and other insects and then bringing those critters in the house. no thank you. but the main reason for not dehydrating outside is the humidity. I can't dehydrate the humidity from the great outdoors and I don't think anyone else can. so just be careful of what you tell others to do.
so this is what I use the powdered berries and citurs for. when you zoom in on the jars, the first taller jar is blueberry and lemon powder. I made 2 jars of that for my breakfast. the next taller jar is rhubarb and orange powder and made 2 more breakfast jars with that. then the last taller jar is my cranberry and orange powder. I made 2 breakfast jars from that.
these breakfast jars are wonderful for me. this is the recipe, such as it is:
my jars are 11 oz size.
1 T chia seeds
1 T ground flax seeds
1 T monkfruit sweetener
5 T old fashioned oats (1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon)
1 T peanut butter powder
1/8th teaspoon of vanilla bean powder or 1/2 tsp of vanilla extract
1 T of fruit and citrus powder, or more, to your liking
I put all that in my jar and shake it down and then I pour my almond milk just up to the rim of the jar. I'll stir it all in real well. it takes quite a bit of stirring to get it mixed up good. put the lids on them and pop them in the fridge. the ingredients will soak up all the almond milk. when I take a jar out for breakfast the next morning, I'll pour about a tablespoon of coconut milk in it for creaminess and stir that in real well and it is soooooo delicious!!! it is so good and good for me. I hope you'll give it a try sometime.
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please forgive any errors that you may see in spelling, I had not planned on such a long blog post this morning, so there is probably errors. hopefully I can come back to this and catch them all later.
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well, that about all I have today. I hope we all have a wonderful day, wherever we are and that we all remember that this is a time to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. it's easy to get lost in the festivities, so let us stay focused on the reason for the season.
blessings of peace love and joy be yours today and everyday. hugs y'all, patty
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