#dehydrator

Easy Oven Dried Watermelon (Vegan)

Hello hello 👋

Wanted to share some kitchen stuff ive been doing. My husband on occasion is able to get produce through work. (Stuff the buyer declines for various reasons and would get tossed otherwise)

Now, depending on how the produce looks, sometimes i just end up giving it to our chickens as free chicken feed. But if it looks good, I'll try to use it up in various ways.

This week they had sliced apples, we got 2 bags, but we dont eat a lot a fresh apples. But thats okay, because I know how to process them into different things 😊

This is what I started with. To be honest, i dont actually know how many pounds it is. I was sort of just winging it because originally, I was just going to cook them and turn the whole things into apple leather.

From raw

To cooked below. I added just a bit of water and lemon juice to keep them from scorching on the pans bottom. Medium heat for about mayby an hour- hour and a half. I did put a lid on it to help speed along the process.

Made the house smell very good! I was originally going to add pie spices, but decided not too.

There was water inside the pot, I poured it into a half gallon glass and diluted it to make apple juice. (Though i added a bit too much water, so its a little weaker than it should be.) I forgot to take a pic and it got drank quick! 😅

I used the blender to puree all the apples, saved a jar of apple sauce for snacking

Old peanut butter jars are awesome for fridge storing!

The fresh apple sauce/puree on the dehydrator trays

I did 2 trays as plain and realised i had a few bananas that needed to be used, so pureed them up with some of the apples and made 2 trays of appleXbanana fruit leather too.

The dried fruit leather, this one is the appleXbanana leather, the plain apple is a might lighter and not as sticky.

The remaining apple×banana mix i put in silicone molds and put in the freezer to make a chilly treat for later. Ill eventually get some sticks to make true Popsicles.

Thats it for now :)

I realized the other day that the household was not eating the watermelon we had fast enough, and rather than let it spoil, I decided to make it into juice.

So... I grabbed some bowls, a colander, a strainer and my food processor.

I had already cut the watermelon up into chunks so I just threw it all into the FP and blended until it looked like the pulpiest juice. Then I poured the slush-like result into the colander. I pressed on that a spoon a little, but mostly I just let it drip. The liquid and pulp that made it through the colander went into the strainer.

The presumably mostly pulp-free liquid, now juice, went into some leftover takeout containers and the like, and in the end I had almost four quarts.

Initially I was planning on composting the pulp, but then it occurred to me, that I could perhaps, make it into something! (I have plans for the rind that I'll be trying soon) After some quick googling, and looking through the booklet that came with my dehydrator (or desiccator, as my mom calls it) I decided to try to make some 'fruit leather'.

The community cupboard for sharing food, sited on a Brunswick footpath, offers a good clue for what lies in the Seeds Community Garden behind the fence: inclusion, generosity and community.

I got a Hamilton Beach 5-tray dehydrator! I did a bit of research but not a ton -- what was important to me was that it have a pretty small footprint, and I wanted the trays to be dishwasher-safe.

I like it quite a lot -- it's a huge step up from my first dehydrator, which I got for free from a neighbor and was basically just a heating coil and a fan with some racks attached. This one is digital so you can set both temperature (between I think 120 and 190? Something like that) and duration, so it'll turn off automatically when it's done. The trays are pretty durable and it comes with a mesh insert and a non-porous insert for stuff like herbs and fruit leather. It makes some noise, but not nearly as much as the old one. The only downside is the cord is quite short, so I bought an extension cord that gives me a little more leeway in where I place it.