Dehydrating yam and potatoes

HI EVERYONE:) Lately I’ve been inspired to use my dehydrator and have brought it into work(a daycare) to make a few fun snacks with the kids.

At home my boyfriend has an OBSESSION with potato chips and this has worn off on ME(the ex health nut) ugh! So I’ve been experimenting with healthy alternatives.

Meet purple yams, orange yams and a plain old russet potato. I did grow potatoes but I bought these ones 🙈 All for the cheap price of $1.28. Where I live we have tons of ‘asian markets’ which are dirt cheap and local 🙌

First get choppin’! I spent about 45 minutes cutting these bad guys up. Keep in mind knife skills are not strong. Ideally you could use a food processor or one of those fancy choppers but this girl cannot stand having tooo many kitchen gadgets.

I sprinkled salt, set the dehydrator’s temperarure to 125 degrees and left them overnight for 12 hours. AND LOOK!

Ok they are a bit thick(hard on my teeth) but they are soo flavourful! Next time I’d make them much thinner but besides that they are perfect.

Do you dehydrate food? What do you make? Any ideas for me? I’d love to hear from you!😘

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A meal from the garden

Sounds perfect, doesn’t it? Today I made spot prawns with bokchoy and peas from my garden. OK the prawns were from the ocean but you know, the vegetable part was grown by me;)

A few of you have asked me how to use bokchoy (aka: pac choi) so I’m here to tell you!

In this case my bokchoy bolted so I haven’t been eating the stem as its very fibreous, better off for a nice animal with large teeth. Instead I’ve been peeling the leaves off and frying them.

It’s a lot like spinach in that it shrinks down and goes a bit limp when you heat it. I added some water and soy sauce and fried them up for about 5 minutes. I added my lovely snow peas in at the end.

This is what the end result looked like!

I’m generally NOT the type of person to take photos of my food but I don’t buy expensive seafood everyday, and this was my first pea harvest…so I had to!

Are your vegetables harvesting? What’s your favorite meal to cook? What do you make with the food from your garden? Happy eating and growing, blogger friends 😄🌱🍴

Dehydrator: sundried tomato recipe

Sundried tomatoes are one of my all time favorite foods. I’ve put them in all sorts of dishes and I will often be caught eating them strait from the jar. But they’re so expensive…even at costco a jar costs upwards of $9.

Anyway as a few of you know I’ve been searching for a new hobby. I knew I love food and cooking and the other day I had some salmon jerky…and ka-ching! I want to try making dehydrated foods.

I opted to buy a new machine since I got paid and it’s 2016 so why not treat myself right? I spent $64 at Canadian Tire for a Salton Food Dehydrator.

Firstly I knew I wanted to experiment since this is a new hobby and I want to have fun. Therefore I tried the tomatoes three different ways: 1) I cut them lengthwise in half 2) I cut them in half, not lengthwise and 3) I quartered them. With this I’ve created my own (very basic) recipe. Here it is:

Ingredients:
Tomatoes: I used cherry tomatoes because I love them
Optional: salt, pepper, basil, olive oil

Instructions:
Cut tomatoes, put in a bowl, toss in a small amount of olive oil, a pinch or two of salt, pepper, basil as desired. Next lay them in your dehydrator with the skin of the tomato down so the wet seedy part is facing upwards.

Very simple, I know.

They turned out wonderfully. However I did learn that the best cut of tomato is horizontally…quarters were much too small. Good luck!

Have you ever dehydrated food? Looking forward to hearing from you all.