Thursday 6 June 2013

Dehydrated Tomatoes

Just a quick update about the dehydrated tomatoes we recently made.


Tonight I put a generous cup or so into the Magic Bullet and it powdered up beautifully! Obviously I've got them dry enough. What struck me was the smell, it almost smelled like the intense tomato smell you get when you've simmered some down for a while.

I added water to it bit by bit until I had a nice thick tomato sauce, and all the dehydrated tomatoes had enough water to rehydrate. Added seasoning/herbs right to the mix as I blended it.

The result was a great tomato sauce that I've used for a casserole. It was so fresh and delicious I could have eaten it the way it was. I would assume that if I kept adding water I could have made a cold tomato soup with it.

I'm definitely dehydrating tomatoes as much as I can over the summer. Not only will it be a great addition to camp foods, but to our cooking over the winter and early spring when the fresh tomatoes are hard to find locally.

We bought a few more trays for the dehydrator. I'm wondering how many I can add to the tower before the air just can't get around everything effectively?

Sunday 2 June 2013

Adventures in Dehydrating

A little over a week ago, we bought a dehydrator. Dehydrating is new to me, but something I've wanted to try for a while. It's a fantastic way to preserve food, which makes a nice addition to what we already can and freeze. Also, I love some dried fruit. I find it much easier to eat dried apples than a whole apple while working at my desk.


I started with some pears and apples. We used fantastic organic pears and apples, and left the skin on (just cut out the cores). We sliced them on our mandolin, abour 3/8" thick.

Have I mentioned I love our mandolin?

The celery was our first vegetable. What you see in that jar above is one bunch of celery. Again, sliced on the mandolin after a good washing, no blanching required. We left the celery on overnight at 125 and it was perfect in the morning.  Another vegetable we did this week was carrots. Those I steamed for 5 - 6 minutes after slicing them on the mandolin. Left them overnight but found they needed a bit of extra time the following day.

Finally, tomatoes! The dried tomatoes have a great taste, I can't wait to cook with them. Roma tomatoes work really well. We probably sliced ours slightly too thick, they took longer than expected. But we did slice them in a manner that they sat skin side down, which really helped to keep the tomato intact and from sticking to the trays.

A before and after:

My week's worth of dehydrated goodies. 


I'm trying my hand at some date bars with seeds and nuts tonight. At the very least I have some tasty nutty/seedy goo to eat on.... something. But if these work out, expect another update soon.

Bacon. Butter. Tart.

It's a bit overdue, but I've meant to post about this monstrously delicious treat we had last month.


Butter tart, meet Bacon. 


I know it's trendy to put bacon into just about everything now, but I'm still exploring the world of bacony sweets. Always enjoyed the taste of bacon when, in a morning breakfast, it would mix with some maple syrup. I've added maple syrup when its cooked before to carmelize it. Yet still, I would never have considered adding it to a butter tart!

We were visiting the Green Living Show in Toronto this April when we tasted these fabulous treats from Madelyn's Diner (Stratford, Ontario).

One of my favourite part of the Green Living Show is the food vendors! We discover something new every year we go. We've bought so many delicious snacks, sauces and goodies there. Many of the vendors have samples available, and it's allowed us to try some really interesting things - from sweets to super foods to vegan entrees.

This year we found a large bag of fairly local (Peterborough?) hemp seeds which were super fresh. We'd been eating the ones bought from a bulk section. These fresh, refridgerated seed are delicious!! In hindsight I wish we'd bought another bag. We eat them every day on oatmeal and add them to salads. And since most items are on a show special, we got them for a better price than we'd been buying the stale ones at.

There is also a food court, with foods and drinks from several local regions. We always buy a handful of tickets and try a few different treats. This is where we found out bacon butter tarts. We ordered one each to take home.

It was.... good! Odd, but good. I'm still not convinced bacon should be in sweet treats, but it's remarkably delicious. The pieces of bacon were thick enough to really keep their definition, otherwise I'd worry that they would begin to meld into the mushiness of the filling. The actual sweet filling for me was slightly too sweet, but it didn't sound like that was an issue for my hubby with a sweet tooth.

My stomach did not thank me later, however. Between the sugar and fats, this is definitely a once in a blue moon kind of treat. Kind of a novelty food, really.

But - bacon. So it's a win.