Dehydrate or Die!

Oh, that's not quite right is it? :)

Instead of hydrating that past few days I've been DEhydrating instead--vegetables that is. Corn, peas, green beans, onions, cabbage, and more have been through my dehydrator in the past 48 hours and now I've got quite a store of dried vegetables to add to my cook pot when I'm on the trail.

I like to take fresh foods and actually do some cooking on the trail or in the woods but now I'm trying a different approach. Now I'm going to try to do it the way they do it at Freezer Bag Cooking with homemade prepared dehydrated foods. I got tons of ideas from Sarah's site when it came to which items to dehydrate and which to just buy dehydrated/freeze dried.

Did you know that you could par-boil pasta, dehydrate it, and cook it in the field in just minutes? You can dehydrate canned and/or cooked beans and they'll give you an excellent source of protein with your meal. You could even par-cook rice, dehydrate it, and add it to your dehydrated beans for a wonderful outdoor meal of beans and rice.

I have taken a rather strange path to get to this stage. My wife always complained about the amount of frozen vegetables and meat I had stored in our freezer because she bought a high-end ice cream maker and needed room to store her creations. I didn't want to lose my veggies which work well in some recipes and are a great addition to meals when I haven't been to the store. Dehydrating those veggies gives them a long shelf life, they're easily rehydrated and cooked, and they free up room in the freezer for homemade ice cream.

I'm finding my GSI Soloist to be an excellent pot for this kind of cooking as it's big enough to accommodate a whole brick of ramen as well as some dehydrated veggies and the lid has a nice drain port and drain holes to get rid of excess water once everything is hydrated and ready to eat.

I'm going to shut the dehydrator down in a few moments just to give myself a mental break from the constant hum but I have plenty more produce to dry in the coming days.

Thanks for reading,


B