Are you worried about the scary world we live in and the impending food-apocalypse? Yeah, me too…
So I bought a dehydrator. It is this one if you are interested. 10/10 recommend it. (I don’t get any money from the link so click away.)
I’ve been interested in food preservation and self-sufficiency since the pandemic began. It was unprecedented (in my lifetime) times and I had recently moved to a grocery wasteland right when it started. Oklahoma, the land of agriculture, has the most bullshit excuses for grocery stores you have ever seen. The places big enough to have a Walmart or a United (the local supermarket chain) are so far apart that keeping huge amounts of goods stocked is unreasonable. Don’t even think about target, Whole Foods, or Sprouts unless you live in OKC or The Northeastern part of the state. I expected farm stands on every corner, but as of yet, these have not been located.
The more I read the more I realized I was missing key tools to make sufficiency more accessible. A high-quality controllable dehydrator was one of them. It arrived about five minutes before I was headed out of town to my parents. I packed up the berries that were starting to get a little soft, the dehydrator, and headed to my parents.
My family has probably gotten used to my unpredictability at this point because when I showed up with it at my parent’s house they were completely unphased. My mother started offering up fruit for the slicing. Once everything had been sliced and put in the dehydrator there was a resounding “Now what?”
“Well, we set the timer and let her go.”
“How Long?”
“Well, we can start with 25 hours and see where that gets us.”
“25 HOURS?”
Maybe she was unprepared.
We spent the rest of the weekend drinking beer and checking the dehydrator every five minutes.
Around the 30-hour mark, mom ripped my door open and exclaimed that all the food had disappeared! It had shrunk significantly but was indeed still present. I eventually ground the berries up into a powder that I add to baked goods!
I did not put any citrus in the dehydrator that day, so when I found limes on sale for a huge discount I bought some to try. To my surprise, they came out amazing! I highly recommend dehydrating citrus. I plop two in a cup of cold water and have flavored water in about three minutes.
I did find that vacuum sealing the excess was a no-go. The bags just air right back up so the limes must puncture the plastic when squished.
Today is green onions and shallots. It’s the equivalent of tear-gassing the house. You’ve been warned.
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