Making camp food: Lentil Soup

We used a recent camping trip as an excuse to dehydrate some of our meals for the trip. One of the things we dried was brown rice. It takes a fraction of the time to rehydrate and heat the rice than it does to cook it from scratch. We threw some dehydrated veggies in with our rice as it rehydrated and we had a great, warm dinner on a rainy night.

Still, my favourite was lentil soup.

I love making lentil soup. I'll eat it thick as a stand alone dish, or make it a bit thinner and add vegetables and eat it like a stew. Lentils are also an incredibly healthy food, they are high in protein and have a low inflammation factor (IF) rating and score on the glycemic index.  It's also a great source of iron and dietary fibre.

And it's delicious. Have I mentioned how great it tastes?

Step 1: Make lentil soup. I made the soup slightly thicker than I normally would, thinking that it would just save time in the long run as the dehydrator would only be removing all of the water in the soup anyway. The soup was seasoned well. You'll find all kinds of lentil recipes on the internet, but it's a pretty easy ingredient to cook with on the fly. The only rule of thumb here is to keep the fat content low since we're going to be dehydrating the soup. In this case I didn't use a stock as the base, rather I used seasoning, onions and the lentils themselves for flavour.

Step 2: Put the lentil soup in the dehydrator. This is where the extra fruit "roll up" trays I bought came in handy. They can be used to dry all kinds of liquids. Spread the soup on the trays as evenly as possible. The edges can be slightly thicker since they tend to dry faster. The lentil soup should be about a 1/4" thick. I believe I dried the soup at 140 overnight.

Step 3: Marvel at the amazing thing you've created. The pieces were bigger than what's shown in the pictures, I broke them up in order to store it better. The lentil soup came out almost cracker like. In fact, I ate a couple of dried pieces and I think it really would make an excellent cracker if I could fine-tune the recipe.  Seal all of the pieces in an air-tight bag or jar.

Step 4: Enjoy a hot cup of previously made lentil soup. We enjoyed this when we were camping, and I rehydrated it with several vegetables which made a hearty soup. With the high protein content, we didn't need to add meat to the meal.  It took about 10 minutes to rehydrate, and I just kept adding water until it had the right consitency.

I'll do this again, even if we're camping somewhere that food is readily available. The resulting meal is delicious and healthy, not to mention completely satisfying. It took almost no room in our camping gear, and dried while we slept.

Have you tried any soups in a dehydrator? I'd love to hear your stories.

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?

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.