Ten meals down – 710 to go – making progress.
Processing my garden produce is almost complete, which means I can transfer my focus to food preparation for the trip. (Complicated by the interruption of the holidays – I love this time of year! We had a sprinkling of snow the other day – I have a confession to make – I turned on Christmas music. Don’t judge me…..)
No food is safe from dehydration in our house. Earlier this week we had tacos for dinner, which resulted in leftover beans, taco meat, and Spanish rice. Instead of seeing left overs as a meal later in the week, I now view them as a dried lump of food just waiting to be rehydrated next spring or summer. Yes, I dehydrated the meat and refried beans and Spanish rice. We will rehydrate them all and add the meat and refried beans to a tortilla shell. These leftovers provided six meals for our trip.
Although it is not a leftover, the next food item I dehydrated was homemade
refried beans. (These are possibly the best refreid beans I have ever eaten!) I made these for a couple of uses: as an ingredient in my award-winning chili and to be dehydrated. The Backpacking Chef has several uses for dehydrated refried beans aka bean bark (and why is it called bark?)
Interestingly, every time we have any leftovers, I find myself, asking,”Can I dehydrate this?” Even soup! We had butternut squash soup (ingredients from my garden, of course) one evening. Before I had finished my bowl of soup, I was making plans to experiment with my Excalibur food dehydrator. I dehydrated soup!! It came out of the dehydrator looking like a sheet of brownish-orange paper. After adding hot water, it looked like and tasted like butternut squash soup. Success!! What a treat this will be on a cool spring evening.
Stayed tuned as I continue to experiment with leftovers. “Can I dehydrate this?”
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