I purchased The Ultimate Dehydrator Cookbook: The Complete Guide to Drying Food plus 398 Recipes including Making Jerky, Fruit Leather & Just-Add-Water Meals by Tammy Gangloff.
Seriously. That's the long-winded title of the book. Click on the above hyper link, it's faster. Her editor should be fired for allowing that kind of title. The good news is the title is really the only bad thing about this book.
I am a relative newbie to dehydrating. A friend introduced me to Tammy's YouTube channel: dehydrate2store. Watching her plethora of videos gave me the confidence to try. I obtained a round dehydrator for free, and saved up money to buy a 4 tray Excalibur dehydrator. <== That hyperlink will take you to a 4 tray which costs about $99. I am glad that I have it (certainly, it is a better purchase than spending $60-80 on a round one for too many reasons to mention), but I wish I had saved up a little more and bought a 9 tray Excalibur <== for $189. Eventually perhaps I will, but I figure: better to be prepping now, than saving up to prep later.
Because I bought my dehydrator used, last year I purchased Excalibur's cookbook: Preserve It Naturally, which costs about $24. I'm not sorry I did, because it helped me understand how to use my Excalibur, but I have to say a year later, I would buy Tammy's vs. Preserve it. Both Tammy's and the Preserve It book presume you have an Excalibur dehydrator...evidenced by the "dehydrate at this temperature" settings in each ingredient. If you have one of those super cheap round ones like I do, this may be frustrating, because we only have "one" setting: full blast. All it really means is you're going to be done faster, lol. Tammy says it's impossible to over dry something, and she's the expert, so I'll take her word for it.
The only other misnomer about Tammy's book is the "398 recipes" part. It's true, there are 398 "recipes," but in my world, it's hard to call "combine these 5 herb ingredients add oil to make X salad dressing..." a recipe, although by definition it is technically true. Still the "true recipes" portion of the book begins about halfway through the 343 page book, so it does include quite a plethora of "true" recipes for meals, side dishes, soups, salads etc. Someone asked me if the "recipes" in the book were different than on her website. I don't know, and frankly, for $16, I prefer a book all in one place, than copying and pasting and having it un-organized in a binder. YMMV.
Some experienced dehydrators feel they don't need the "recipes" part. As a newbie dehydrater, I strongly disagree. That recipe portion of the book is the reason I bought it. I'm going further this year and dehydrating a (finished product) quart of every vegetable and fruit ingredient listed in her book. There are 96 of them by the way, not including herbs. Email me (pcdirector@gmail.com) if you want the list. My thought is: if I dehydrate every ingredient, then when I go to make the recipes, beyond bulking up my food storage, I will actually have the ingredients on hand.
Eventually I will be taking the some of the recipes and sizing them down to cook Grid Down! in a Thermos (title of my new work-in-progress book-just saying.) (Can you tell I'm a bit of an addict when it comes to food storage and prepping?) Post-move, I plan to build shelving out of 1" x 6"s to store all the dehydrated quarts. In alphabetical order. Neatly arranged. (Further evidence that I am a nerd.)
It's because I look at dehydrating as a prepper that I raise an eyebrow at some of Tammy's recommendations. This largely centers around her "cream of" type recipes. She takes the ingredients, rehydrates/cooks them, then uses an immersion blender to puree them. ME, I would take the ingredients, cook them, puree them, then dehydrate the puree so that in a grid down situation, all you have to do is add hot water and go. She advocates her method when it comes to pureed soups repeatedly. I can't understand why.
At $16, The Ultimate Dehydrator Cookbook is a must have. In true nerd fashion, I read it (not skimmed, read it, including all the recipes) cover to cover in 2 days. I loved being taught how to make crackers, how to dry herbs for teas, leathers (who knew corn syrup was a secret ingredient to pliability?), drying meats and fish, and combining dehydrated ingredients into main courses. I particularly value that it is written to the beginner to mid-level dehydrater, but I think even the most experienced dehydrater will find something of value. Easy to read, easy to understand, by the time you have read it cover to cover, you will catch the vision of dehydrating food to store. I really wish I hadn't missed the "pumpkin season:" sure would be nice to have a quart of dehydrated pumpkin powder to make pumpkin pie in a snap.
As a prepper, this book gives me the confidence to begin or add to my food storage & skills. I know I can build an off grid dehydrator (she doesn't teach this in her book) and have yet another way to preserve food. I've always planned on using my quart pasta sauce jars from re-invented Classico or La Romanella to store my dehydrated items, making the cost of storage virtually free. Tammy advocates the use of oxygen absorbers as a sealant. I can't afford them, they're not reusable, so I'm going to be sealing them with my handheld Reynolds (or Foodsaver) sealer, and Food Saver's Regular Mouth and Wide Mouth jar sealers, the lids to which can be reused indefinitely. My video demonstrating using the handheld to store food can be found here: http://youtu.be/uRRdpbQzqqE?list=UUcBqcPCg2yBUou3KRvOhloA.
The Ultimate Dehydrator Cookbook by Tammy Gangloff is likely one of the best books on dehydrating you'll ever purchase. It could well be the only book on dehydrating you will need to purchase, it's that good.
Stay tuned!
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
Friday, December 12, 2014
Grid Down! Cooking Baked Potato Soup without Fuel
First in a series of recipes, demos and ideas of cooking dehydrated food (storage) with little or no fuel!
Very excited to be posting this series, hoping to blog and post one a week over the next year.
As you know, I am a huge fan of freeze dried food storage for the simple fact that it is "boil water and go" food storage. While I like dehydrated food in my food storage, I've always been bothered that dehydrated food takes on average, 10-15 minutes of constant cooking time over heat. That's a lot of fuel you'll need to burn in a grid down situation!
WELL, I am beyond excited to tell you that I have come up with a way to cook normal, dehydrated food storage in a grid down situation with very little fuel--in fact it only takes as much fuel as you need to boil water. In a Kelly Kettle, you can boil water in about 3 minutes, using very little fuel. I cheated in this particular video, and boiled water on a stove, sorry!
This particular demo takes commercially prepared, non-precooked dehydrated food (pre-cooked dehydrated food will have a different re-'cooking' time) and in 30-45 minutes you can have mouth watering, hot, fresh tasting, gourmet food in a grid down situation.
The secret to my success?
Cooking in a Thermos! Not keeping it warm in a thermos. COOKING in a thermos. Watch the video below for more, and stay tuned for many more exciting cooking ideas using dehydrated food storage and the trusty metal thermos.
By the way: you should (but not absolutely) "pre-heat" your thermos for best results. This can be accomplished by filling the thermos about 1/3 to 1/2 way full with boiling water (do NOT secure the cap on top at this stage) and let sit for about 5 minutes, while you are reboiling more water for the actual meal (in a Kelly Kettle this is lightning fast). Use that hot but now slightly cooled initial water to make hot chocolate, or store it for later.
Enjoy! (You'll need to go to this YT hyperlink to get the link information mentioned at the end of the video. Do I look tech savvy??? NO!!!) http://youtu.be/49BOAwDqlKk
Very excited to be posting this series, hoping to blog and post one a week over the next year.
As you know, I am a huge fan of freeze dried food storage for the simple fact that it is "boil water and go" food storage. While I like dehydrated food in my food storage, I've always been bothered that dehydrated food takes on average, 10-15 minutes of constant cooking time over heat. That's a lot of fuel you'll need to burn in a grid down situation!
WELL, I am beyond excited to tell you that I have come up with a way to cook normal, dehydrated food storage in a grid down situation with very little fuel--in fact it only takes as much fuel as you need to boil water. In a Kelly Kettle, you can boil water in about 3 minutes, using very little fuel. I cheated in this particular video, and boiled water on a stove, sorry!
This particular demo takes commercially prepared, non-precooked dehydrated food (pre-cooked dehydrated food will have a different re-'cooking' time) and in 30-45 minutes you can have mouth watering, hot, fresh tasting, gourmet food in a grid down situation.
The secret to my success?
Cooking in a Thermos! Not keeping it warm in a thermos. COOKING in a thermos. Watch the video below for more, and stay tuned for many more exciting cooking ideas using dehydrated food storage and the trusty metal thermos.
By the way: you should (but not absolutely) "pre-heat" your thermos for best results. This can be accomplished by filling the thermos about 1/3 to 1/2 way full with boiling water (do NOT secure the cap on top at this stage) and let sit for about 5 minutes, while you are reboiling more water for the actual meal (in a Kelly Kettle this is lightning fast). Use that hot but now slightly cooled initial water to make hot chocolate, or store it for later.
Enjoy! (You'll need to go to this YT hyperlink to get the link information mentioned at the end of the video. Do I look tech savvy??? NO!!!) http://youtu.be/49BOAwDqlKk
Saturday, December 6, 2014
Making Money Online (aka Working from Home)
One way is to Take Surveys from Home (for pay.)
At the risk of sounding like a commercial, please do yourself the favor of reading through the whole blogpost before you roll your eyes <grin.>
About a year ago (it was actually the end of October, first of November last year), an acquaintance of mine and I from the prepping world were talking about what he does for a living, since he works from home and actually makes enough to support his family. He started off building websites for people (beyond my technical capabilities). Then he branched out into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for those websites on retainer, which is, over time, where the bulk of his income was coming from.
I didn't know what that was, so we talked a bit about it. Summary version is: when you search for a product, most of the time you type in something like "dog kennels in Westerville." Google (or Bing etc.) gives you results based on those words. In Google's case (I detest Bing), it can give you pages and pages. 99% of the time you will only look on the first or second page (out of 1000s) of results. So what he did is (manually) drove traffic (search engine optimization) so that his clients' sites came up on the first page when you typed in (example) "dog kennels in Westerville."
Sigh. I'm like, way beyond my abilities. Then David said, "but then I found this really cool product which more or less automates SEO and allows me to set up my own websites and passively earn income." (Scooby questioning sound heard here=>) "Rrruuhh?" Ok. He now had my attention. He uses a product called Sniper to build websites on the Wordpress (the blog people) platform. As he built more and more of them, he gradually decreased his SEO business (although he used the Sniper system to automate his clients' sites).
I asked if it was hard to do (cuz after all, he's a techie, and I'm not). He said no, even someone like "me" could do it (being a nice guy, he did not say dumb bunny. I would have.) So I went to the Sniper site, watched the promo video (the creator George, loves to hear himself talk, fair warning), and thought, you know? I can do this. And at $47, it wasn't a huge risk.
I am not a super blogger, but my DH is. So I figured between the two of us (and him being unemployed) we could really make a go of this. I implemented only a miniscule amount of what George teaches in his videos, frankly, because I am not a tech person, and I wanted to see if it was "real" before I invested a lot of time (there's an oxymoron if I ever heard one.) But then DH found a "real job" so he didn't "have time" to help me, so I was back to my own devices.
The first month I made $124. I'd like to lie and tell you I made thousands. And you know, maybe if I'd done EVERYTHING from soup to nuts, the way I was supposed to, I would have. I'd like to tell you that my enthusiasm for the fact that his system works, even if you only implement a tiny bit of it, caused me to get off my lazy rear end and invest the time into training and learning how to develop passive sites, since on average, the little bit I did brought in $50 a month.
But I can't. Because I am a lazy sloth. But I'm repenting. I've been babysitting this past year and averaging about $600-800 a month babysitting; we've needed the money and I'm grateful. But that's working about 20 hours a week. The other day, a lightbulb went on. If I'd spent 20 hours a week really committing to building sites using George's system, I probably wouldn't need to be doing childcare. So I'm changing my ways.
And sharing my process with you. He's actually upgraded the process, and now there's a "copy me" training system in addition to the general system where he shows you how to build passive sites step by step. That's another $97, but if you are a dumb bunny (my words) like me, that's pretty invaluable. So if you've got 20 minutes (no really. 20 minutes. Like I said...the boy loves to hear himself talk), check out the => Sniper system. It really does work, and this year, I'm committed to making it work for me.
Thanks for letting me share.
At the risk of sounding like a commercial, please do yourself the favor of reading through the whole blogpost before you roll your eyes <grin.>
About a year ago (it was actually the end of October, first of November last year), an acquaintance of mine and I from the prepping world were talking about what he does for a living, since he works from home and actually makes enough to support his family. He started off building websites for people (beyond my technical capabilities). Then he branched out into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for those websites on retainer, which is, over time, where the bulk of his income was coming from.
I didn't know what that was, so we talked a bit about it. Summary version is: when you search for a product, most of the time you type in something like "dog kennels in Westerville." Google (or Bing etc.) gives you results based on those words. In Google's case (I detest Bing), it can give you pages and pages. 99% of the time you will only look on the first or second page (out of 1000s) of results. So what he did is (manually) drove traffic (search engine optimization) so that his clients' sites came up on the first page when you typed in (example) "dog kennels in Westerville."
Sigh. I'm like, way beyond my abilities. Then David said, "but then I found this really cool product which more or less automates SEO and allows me to set up my own websites and passively earn income." (Scooby questioning sound heard here=>) "Rrruuhh?" Ok. He now had my attention. He uses a product called Sniper to build websites on the Wordpress (the blog people) platform. As he built more and more of them, he gradually decreased his SEO business (although he used the Sniper system to automate his clients' sites).
I asked if it was hard to do (cuz after all, he's a techie, and I'm not). He said no, even someone like "me" could do it (being a nice guy, he did not say dumb bunny. I would have.) So I went to the Sniper site, watched the promo video (the creator George, loves to hear himself talk, fair warning), and thought, you know? I can do this. And at $47, it wasn't a huge risk.
I am not a super blogger, but my DH is. So I figured between the two of us (and him being unemployed) we could really make a go of this. I implemented only a miniscule amount of what George teaches in his videos, frankly, because I am not a tech person, and I wanted to see if it was "real" before I invested a lot of time (there's an oxymoron if I ever heard one.) But then DH found a "real job" so he didn't "have time" to help me, so I was back to my own devices.
The first month I made $124. I'd like to lie and tell you I made thousands. And you know, maybe if I'd done EVERYTHING from soup to nuts, the way I was supposed to, I would have. I'd like to tell you that my enthusiasm for the fact that his system works, even if you only implement a tiny bit of it, caused me to get off my lazy rear end and invest the time into training and learning how to develop passive sites, since on average, the little bit I did brought in $50 a month.
But I can't. Because I am a lazy sloth. But I'm repenting. I've been babysitting this past year and averaging about $600-800 a month babysitting; we've needed the money and I'm grateful. But that's working about 20 hours a week. The other day, a lightbulb went on. If I'd spent 20 hours a week really committing to building sites using George's system, I probably wouldn't need to be doing childcare. So I'm changing my ways.
And sharing my process with you. He's actually upgraded the process, and now there's a "copy me" training system in addition to the general system where he shows you how to build passive sites step by step. That's another $97, but if you are a dumb bunny (my words) like me, that's pretty invaluable. So if you've got 20 minutes (no really. 20 minutes. Like I said...the boy loves to hear himself talk), check out the => Sniper system. It really does work, and this year, I'm committed to making it work for me.
Thanks for letting me share.
Monday, December 1, 2014
Throw Out 50 Things....
....Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life :)
I need to stop feeling guilty that I may end up throwing stuff in the trash versus "donating" it to charity, or "freecycling" it away.
That's the title of the book by life coach Gail Blanke: Throw Out 50 Things, Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life.
Today I threw out virtually all the paperwork in an old file cabinet, and am trying to freecycle out the file cabinet itself (any takers?)
I cleared out all the trash in the Saturn so that I can get rid of it tomorrow.
I freecycled out a baseball hitting stick and a box of empty pasta jars.
Tomorrow I'm going to clear out a bunch more and just TOSS IT. I know I've been saying this for almost a year. I start. I stop. I start. I stop. I whine. I feel sorry for myself. But I am NOT going to move this stuff with me. Landlord is back from out of state. He'll be here probably by the end of the week to do "an inspection." It is ever present in my mind that we are, at any time, 60 days away from eviction depending on his "mood."
I should have been chucking and recycling a trash can full every week for at least the past three months. It's ok. I've actually got a little time the next few days. I started today. I will get rid of more tomorrow. I just need to not look at it. I need to stop belaboring the point that I'm the one who needs to do it. All of my kids offered today to "help." The problem is I don't actually know where to start (for them anyway.)
I need to stop feeling guilty that I may end up throwing stuff in the trash versus "donating" it to charity, or "freecycling" it away.
Like today, I went through that file cabinet I've been intending to clear out for a year. 99.9% of it I didn't need: old bills, credit card statements etc. Some of it, I did: old divorce papers which prove liability for my ex, pictures, some genealogy paperwork. That's not something I can hand off to someone. Tomorrow (if not tonight) I get rid of the actual file cabinet so I can use the space to store other things. I'm going to go through the kitchen tonight and tomorrow and get rid of stuff in there too. I need to not be sentimental about stuff which makes my life easier once a year.
Just saying. Wish me luck.
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