 I heard something pretty neat yesterday in an Adrian Rogers sermon. I sure miss him. His “Adrianisms” are just priceless. The quote yesterday concerned those who are married and he referred particularly to us women. He said that “the woman’s job is to love her husband. It is God’s job to make him good.” Of course, that goes ditto for the husbands regarding wives, but I pondered on that for a moment and had to look at where I try to take on God’s job with Mr. Fix-It. We women are really good at trying to “fix” our husbands into the men that “we know they should be.” Yikes. Now don’t get me wrong…Mr. Fix-It is close to perfect – but I am the normal woman who can find that tiny loose thread in any sweater and unravel the whole thing trying to make it right. And so, the next time I decide that I need to tell Mr. Fix-It what he “needs to be doing” I think I’ll shut my trap. Perhaps my focus needs to be on what I need to be doing! He is awfully sweet and treats me like a queen. And speaking of sweet, I’ve been dehydrating sweet potatoes! Yep. This is the time of year when those tubers start going on sale and with our new organic grocery stores, I am hoping to cash in on some really nice ones. The sweet potato is one thing I hadn’t tried dehydrating, but last week I decided it was something I should try. What a success!! And when I served them for dinner the other night, Mr. Fix-It smacked his lips and commented on how good they were. “There were dehydrated,” I crowed. “I figured as much,” he said as he chomped on another mouthful. He has gotten used to my dehydration experiments and is pretty impressed with the results. It is just too neat to have jars of dehydrated sweet potatoes on hand to whip out and create a casserole or candied yams. I have always had such trouble with potatoes going bad in the bin and so this is a welcome discovery! So grab your taters and start slicing and here’s how to dry them and how to use them afterwards!  Wash and peel sweet potatoes  Slice the potatoes in slices about 1/8″ thick  Drop the slices into boiling water and boil for 2 minutes. Drain and drop into iced water with ice cubes and leave in the water until ice cubes melt. Drain the water.  Place blanched slices onto dehydrator racks without overlapping and dehydrate for at least 15 hours. You want them nice and dried.  Store potatoes in mason jars or ziploc freezer bags. You can vacuum seal the jars but it is not required. 1 cup of dehydrated slices per potato needed. Plan approximately 1/2 potato per person. Per 1 or 2 potatoes: 1/3 cup butter 1/2 cup packed brown sugar pinch of salt chopped pecans miniature marshmallows  Soak potatoes overnight in the refrigerator, covered in water in a bowl. The potatoes will soak up much of the water.  Pour contents of the bowl, water included, into boiling water and boil until slices are tender. Drain.  Layer the sweet potato slices in a casserole dish. I just used the equivalent of one potato in a small casserole for me and Mr. Fix-It. I miss making those big dinners when all the kids were home!!  Melt butter and brown sugar and salt together in a pan on medium heat  The mixture will make a smooth sauce  Pour the brown sugar sauce over the potatoes.  Sprinkle chopped pecans over the surface. Bake in a 350º oven for 30 minutes.  After 20 minutes of baking, sprinkle marshmallows over the top of the casserole and allow to brown for the last 10 minutes of baking.  Now THAT is some Southern yumminess!!  |
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Posts Tagged ‘dehydrating’
Dried Orange Zest
Monday, April 18th, 2011
  I don’t know about you, but one of the worst things I know of in cooking, is zesting lemons, limes and oranges. I have, in the past, posted the tip to freeze your rinds in freezer bags to whip out in your time of need and zest with much greater ease. However, no matter fresh or frozen fruit hulls, the zester makes no distinction between the rind and your knuckles. More than once, I have let go a yelp because I got too close to those nasty little teeth that rip the skin. Now, I’m a great fan of oranges and it seems that the ones recently have been extra good. Oranges are like candy to me and so Mr. Fix-It says nothing when he finds me typing away at the computer with sticky fingers and juice dripping from my chin. Yes, yes. My momma taught me better. I just grin and hand him a quarter and say, “Wanna slice?” He always takes it.  So I’m munching on an extra sweet citrus and I’m staring at the pile of peels on the cutting board. My mind clicks and I think, “So, why couldn’t I dry the peels and chop them up for zest?” And so my experiment began.  Now, the whole point of zest is to basically just take the outer rind of the fruit. No fibrous, white, inner rind. I know that when I’m zesting, though, I get some of that white lining and so I figured a little wouldn’t hurt. Therefore, I used a sharp knife and slid it under the inner skin and carefully cut between it and the outer orange rind.  I laid the cut rinds out in the air to dry. I decided not to use a dehydrator because I was concerned that the heat would change the flavor of the orange rind zest.  After a week, the skins were so dry they were leathery/brittle. I popped them into the blender and pulverized them!   The result was wonderful! I figured out that I could put the “zest” into a jar and then just keep adding as I dried more oranges. I did the same with lemons. Actually, I found lemons for 33¢ each and so I bought a boatload. I brought those home and juiced them, froze the juice in ice trays as 1 oz cubes and then quartered the rinds to easily slice the white inner skin from the outer rind. I dried those too. In the picture, the lemon zest is to the left and the orange is on the right.  I used the zest in my basic scones recipe and wow. They were wonderful. That’ll be my next post – the recipe! All I know is that now I have a new “zest for life!” 🙂 |
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Dehydrating Series Pt IV
Monday, January 24th, 2011
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I’m sitting here listening to my sweet hubby laugh his head off as he is pulling up YouTube videos of “Carl” (Billy Bob Thorton) from the movie Slingblade making prank calls to restaurants and asking the clerks for “French fried pertaters and biscuits and I like some mustard with those biscuits, uh-huh”. The clerks are attempting to take this order with as much grace as possible. I have to admit that I’m laughing too. I guess I’m remembering the phone calls I used to make, from our church phone on Wednesday service nights no less, to Weigel’s Dairy Store in Knoxville, Tennessee to tell the clerk, in high pitched squeals, “Your cows are out!” immediately hanging up the phone. Real smooth, huh? Kinda like the phone calls my grandparents used to receive in the ’30’s, at their grocery store, where a voice asked if they carried Prince Albert in a can and with the answer in the affirmative, young voices would yell, “Then let him out!!” We are so brilliant when we are young. However, it seems that Mr. Thorton is still brilliant – he’s entertaining my husband, anyway!  There is nothing I enjoy more than putting a piping hot meal before Mr. Fix-It after a long day’s work. I especially love him because he loves soup and that is one of my favorite things in the whole world on these cold days. But I’m weird. I love it on warm days too – homemade that is. When I go to Olive Garden, I’m the “Never Ending Soup and Salad” kinda gal. Therefore, it is really pleasant to have all of the ingredients for soup right at my fingertips, dried and ready to reconstitute for any quick, hot meal. In this fourth and final in my series on dehydrating, I’ve got a recipe for broccoli cheese soup that will leave you craving more. Let’s go! 1 Tbsp Olive Oil 1 Tbsp dried celery (1 stalk fresh chopped) 1 tsp dried bell pepper (tbsp fresh) 1 Tbsp dried onion (2 Tbsp diced fresh onion) 1/4 tsp dried garlic (1 tsp fresh, chopped garlic) 1/3 cup dried potatoes (1 cup cubed fresh potatoes) 1/2 cup dried broccoli (1 1/2 cup chopped fresh broccoli) 4 chicken bouillon cubes 4 1/2 cups water 1 can milk or 3/4 cups half and half 1/4 lb Velveeta Cheese + or – 1 Tbsp corn starch + 2 Tbsp water              |
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Dehydrating Series Pt I – Celery
Monday, January 10th, 2011
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Here in Oklahoma, most of us are tough old birds. We’ve learned the only thing predictable is that there is nothing much predictable in this state. One minute you can bake a chicken in your car and the next minute you’re trying to figure out how to get that car out of a snow drift. Of course, the car can get cooked in one of our prairie fires as well. Ice storms can paralyze daily life for a week and tornadoes can change lives forever. And then of course, there are the hail storms. So, we Okies have pretty much figured out that you don’t need a government commission on emergency preparedness to tell us to be prepared. We’ve been prepared since the days of the Land Run when barrels of beans, flour and sugar and a crock of sourdough starter meant protection from starvation when the WalMart shelves were empty. Unfortunately, there ARE some city dwellers here who have either forgotten these facts or who moved here from some foreign country, like Los Angeles, who get caught with their rations down. But for the most part, we’re a pretty prepared and flexible lot. I got tickled the other day when a 30 minute program was aired to remind us that we have the likes of tornadoes and such here in Oklahoma. Ya think? A body would have to be living in a cave 24/7 to miss that little bit of reality. Anyway, the Oklahoma preparedness program has been called “Red Dirt Ready” and the name symbolizes the fact the Okies immediately jump in to help after a disaster, getting all covered in Oklahoma’s famous red dirt. That’s true. We do. It’s what makes this state great.   Electricity can be a problem around here. It is not unusual for us to be without for a couple of days and in many areas that can run into a number of weeks. That wreaks havoc on one’s frozen vittles if one hasn’t a generator and so it is nice to have plenty of stock that requires no refrigeration. That would seem impossible for such things as fruits and veggies, but not so! The age old art of dehydrating comes in really handy to offer up a pantry full of wonderful and healthy treats that will last a looooong time. Having a garden each year, I dehydrate stuff yearly, but lately, I’ve been a dehydrating fool. I have been challenging myself to see what I can dry next and how best to use it. I’ve decided to do a series on using a dehydrator with recipes. Today I’m demonstrating celery and broccoli drying. I was inspired to do the celery because our local store, Firelake Grocery, had celery on sale, 3 large bags for $1. The broccoli was on sale as well – two good sized heads for $1. I use a lot of both. Now, I need to sidetrack here for a sec because I realize that these are not organic items coming from a local grocer. However, with food prices soaring, many people can’t afford the more expensive organic foods and I want to let them know that it’s ok. This is where my faith comes into play. I see 3 large bags of celery for $1 as a blessing and I see God as my provider of blessings. Therefore, I just trust that all I can do is the best that I can and trust God to take care of me. In other words, I eat as healthily as I can and leave the rest up to the Lord. Shoot, I used to break thermometers when I was young and chase the little balls of mercury around on the table for hours with my friends! I promise, I don’t glow in the dark – although I do have very white hair. Do you suppose – – – ? Back to the celery and broccoli. The long and the short of it is that I bought 16 bags of celery and a lot of broccoli. Neither of these items is anything you can keep for any amount of time unless you dry them or freeze them. I like to freeze celery by chopping it, leaves and all, and spreading it onto a cookie sheet, freezing it hard and then taking it off of the sheet to place it into freezer bags. That way the pieces stay separate and don’t clump up. Frozen celery is a quick addition for sautéing and putting into chicken salad. However, as I said, frozen is useless when there is no electricity. Plus, I don’t have that much freezer space! I froze one bag of this celery and all of the rest I dried.              So there you have it. That will keep you busy for a couple of days and by Thursday, you’ll be ready for a recipe. I’ve made a New Year’s Resolution – I’m going to do my dead level best to post twice a week, hopefully Mondays and Thursdays. Just remember what happens to New Year’s Resolutions – they’re kinda all dried up too. |
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