I can't Deni this feeling..

This weekend, while visiting my hometown of Columbus, I stumbled upon a nice little food dehydrator while thrifting around at New Uses. New Uses is a Plato's Closet store of sorts, except instead of clothes, they have applicances and furniture, etc. They had a Deni brand dehydrator for $20, and so I had to purchase it, of course! I have a small problem with Food Preservation Tool Envy. I know, I know- it's bad.

So of course, I had to try out this new toy of mine. Yesterday I sliced up some Goldrush apples and powered up the Deni!

Results? Fairly impressed! Some trays took longer than others to dry out, but in fairness I cheated and did a little bit of overlapping that was not supposed to happen. I also was not 100% precise in my apple slice-measurement techniques. Oh well! The only annoying part was that I was silly and started the process at 6:30pm, which meant that I was up at 1am and 3am and 5am checking on apple slices. I need to do it on a day where I get home early, or on the weekend.

My next goal is to make some fruit leathers! I never in my wildest preserving dreams thought I would be making fruit leathers. I'm pretty (way-too) psyched about it. I'm thinking blueberry/raspberry fruit leathers?

Also, I went to the Worthington Farmer's Market with my mom over the weekend, and they had the most delicious F'ing strawberries there. Ever. Pardon my language, but those berries were just SO good. Each time we took a bite of one throughout the day, one of us felt compelled to exclaim something like, "OH my GOD these berries are SO FUCKING GOOD!" or some other comment about how the berries in the store in January are like mutant berries from hell. So well done, farmer man in Worthington. Those are some sweet strawberries! If I could have forseen that I would be buying a dehydrator later on that day, I would have bought like 4 quarts and preserved those babies!

Another day.

Other preserving goals this week:

• Make blue/raspberry fruit leathers
• Can applesauce and apple slices
• Make and freeze some more soup broth
• Make and freeze more chilli before tomatoes and peppers go away for the season
• Stop by Farmer's markets and freeze good veggies before market closes down for season!

Can I do it all?

Yes I can! :)