Food for Faith

Thought I would write a little about my continuing dehydrator adventure.

Yesterday I dried papaya. I have some trees, but I don’t eat the fruit, because it smells a little bit like dog poop. I wondered if dehydration would change that. I suppose I’m picking the papayas too late, and that’s why they stink, but it seems odd to pick a fruit that isn’t sweet yet.

Anyway, I sliced up a papaya and tossed the chunks in lime juice and simple syrup. After about seven hours in the machine, they were dried up to nothing. I tried one, and sure enough, it doesn’t stink like it did before. So now I have a use for all the papayas that come off the trees.

Funny thing…the product is not like the dried papaya you get in stores. It really shrivels up. I’m wondering if there is a difference between “dried” and “dehydrated.” Guess I’ll have to figure that out.

I have not made jerky yet. I think I’ll get ten boliches (eye round roasts) and dry them. It would probably be best to smoke them, too, but maybe I can fake that with Liquid Smoke and avoid the aggravation.

Mike says he has a yogurt machine. Evidently you can make your own yogurt for a small fraction of the price of store yogurt. How exciting. I guess it’s a big blessing, but I’ve never been a huge yogurt fan. I always identify yogurt with the feminist/greenie/Mac/vegetarian lifestyle.

You can use a dehydrator to make yogurt, and you can even turn the yogurt into dry sheets. Weird.

Yesterday I realized I can make shucky beans in the dehydrator. Man, that would be sweet. I need to find a farmer’s market and load up on green beans. Or I could just chicken out and hit Costco. I don’t know if the beans would brown up the way they do when you dry them on strings.

I just got an idea for food storage: corned beef. I look up a recipe on the Cook’s Illustrated site, and it says corned beef is just cured beef. You stick it in a sealed bag with a salt and seasoning preparation, and you let it sit for 7 days. If that’s all it is, it’s perfect for freezing. Seal everything in a bag, refrigerate for a week, and then freeze. That should work, shouldn’t it?

I Googled flooding and crops again, to see if Perry Stone is right about his vision of upcoming food problems. Things don’t look too good. We have no corn reserves, and the weather is not great. The food situation in China is bad. I guess this year will teach me whether I should pay attention to this man’s visions in the future.

The dehydrator looks like a good investment. I still want to get out of here and put some land around me, but until that happens, I think I’ll be fine with stored eats. And I didn’t lose anything by buying a refurb unit. It looks and works like new.

Mike is jealous. Oh well. Now he has something to put on his shopping list.