Main Street Meatloaf using Dehydrated Veggies

This is a recipe that came with my FoodSaver..  

I made a few changes such as using dehydrated veggies but the basic recipe is still the same.. 

All the dried foods came from my garden and was dried in my Excalibur

MAIN STREET MEATLOAF

4 tablespoons dried onions 

4 tablespoons dried celery

4 tablespoons dried chopped or shredded carrots

3 tablespoons dried chopped mushrooms

3 tablespoons dried chopped red, orange and yellow bell peppers

1 tablespoon dried parsley

1/2 teaspoon dried thyme

1/2 teaspoon dried marjoram

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon black pepper

1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

4 cloves garlic, minced (I used fresh)

1/2 cup light cream or milk

1/2 cup ketchup

2 lbs lean ground beef

1 lb of savory pork sausage

3/4 cup bread crumbs 

TOPPING

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

1/2 cup tomato sauce

3 thick slices of bacon

place all dried vegetables (not herbs) in a bowl and cover with boiling water.. let sit for about an hour then drain. 

Preheat oven to 375 degrees, Coat a large rectangular baking dish with cooking spray.

Place everything except the topping ingredients in a large bowl and mix thoroughly either by hand or using a Kitchen Aid mixer..

Shape into a loaf and place in baking pan.

Mix the tomato sauce and Worcestershire sauce together and spread over loaf.. place bacon on top and bake for 45 minutes or until internal temp reaches 162

Remove from oven, loosely cover and let rest for 15 minutes. 

Slice and enjoy

One of the best meatloaf recipes I've found.

Food Storage Record Keeping Made Easy

I don't consider myself a Prepper..   

stocking up on food is and always has been a way of life for me.  

I grew up on a farm and we stored enough food to make it to the next growing season.  Moving to Urban living is no different to me, I still grow a garden and the things I can't grow I buy in quantities when on sale.

I do keep spare water because I've seen the times when a water main broke and we needed stored water to drink.

I've also saw times when ice storms has knocked out the power for weeks at a time and the store shelves were bare.

With out our food storage we'd been a bit hungry.

so if that makes me a Prepper, then so be it.

The reason I'm showing you a glimpse of my storage is to bring to mind how hard it is to keep track of what you do have.

Do you really think you can remember all that you have stashed away and the expiration dates without a record?

I can't

Not without a record of some kind

And that's what this blog is all about, I want to show you what and how I keep up with everything.

If you are using Google Chrome then you probably know all about how you can keep up with everything from browser to browser to different computers.. bookmarks follow you on all your signed in computers.

Did you know Google also has a Drive you can use to store pictures and documents?  Yup and it also follows you on all your devices.

But the neatest part is Drive also has a spread sheet

BINGO

That's what you can use for your storage records.. make changes anytime you add or remove and item and no matter which computer you're on you can access it and even print off hard copies.

Now you ready for the next BINGO?

If you own a Kindle Fire you can also access those pictures and records.. some people say you can't but you can.

Go to Amazon app store and download their ES3 app.

Sorry the center of the app didn't show up but you can read what's under it and see the shape.. it's a light blue with ES3 written inside.

Using that app you can download Google Drive and all your records.

There's my records on my Kindle Fire

You can add or remove on it too, just like on your computer.

Same as on my computer

Neat huh?

If you're like me, when I come across a good deal at the store, say on syrup, I like to know how many I have stored in the basement.

I don't want more then we can use before it expires so I print off a hard copy of my list and keep it in my wallet.

I guess you could take your tablet to the store but that's not something I care to do when a printed copy works just as well.

I'm so in love with this that I'm planning on making up lists for my two freezers.. and who knows, I might even start a list of my upstairs pantry.

JALAPENO SALT AND PEPPER

My family is addicted to jalapeno salt and pepper

It's delicious on just about everything.. the first time I made some I added salt to keep it from clumping but adding extra salt to some foods wasn't a healthy idea so I now make some with black pepper too and this is working out great..

Use the jalapeno salt when cooking and the jalapeno pepper on already salted foods.

The other day I found some nice looking jalapenos at a local Mexican store for 99 cents a pound and I bought 11 pounds of them.

Cut into long slices and dried in my Excalibur dehydrator over night at 135 degrees

I use my herb/coffee grinder and after I fill each salt shaker half full I top one off with salt and the other with black pepper then I dump each one back in the grinder for a quick pulse to make sure their blended.

A word of warning 

be sure you wear a face mask when doing this because the fine powder will get breathed into your nose.. when you take the lid off the grinder it looks like a green cloud floating up and around you.

 if you don't own a mask then wrap a wet rag around your face.

How to Make Tomato Powder With Can tomatoes and Tomato Paste

Tomato powder

Fairly cheap and not hard to make

First I tried drying cans of tomato paste but the leather was hard to grind and wanted to clump, just not enough moisture in it, so this time around I used two cans of tomatoes with one can of paste and it worked great, just the consistency needed.

Toss it in a blender and blend until smooth

Dry at 125 degrees for approximately 10 to 14 hours or until completely dry to touch.

Two cans of whole or diced tomatoes and one can of paste filled 3 dehydrator trays.

I also found that I could use two cans of tomato sauce in place of the can tomatoes with the same result.

They dried nice and thin. I removed them from the leather trays and flipped them over onto the net trays and dried them for another hour to make sure all moisture was removed.

Two cans of dried ground tomatoes and one can of paste made 7 1/2 tablespoons of powder.

All 9 trays didn't even make a pint

but it's packed with concentrated flavor

Excalibur Food Dehydrator versus American Harvest Nesco

I was asked to do a comparison between the Nesco and Excalibur food dehydrators

and

I'm totally blown away

Celery dried in 14 hours in the Excalibur

My Nesco

14 hours later only the edges are dry and I even rotated the trays before going to bed.

Two months ago I bought an American Harvester Nesco due to the price, it gets the job done but at a much slower rate.

From now on any dehydrators in my future will be an Excalibur

Yogurt Chips

A local store had fruit yogurt on sale for 50 cents each and I just had to try dehydrating some.

I wanted them bite size so I dropped teaspoons full on leather trays

I can't say for sure how many hours they took to dry because I put them into the dehydrator around 10 am at 125 degrees and that evening I removed them from the leather trays, flipped them over and laid them on net trays to make sure the bottoms were dry and let them continue to dry at 125 over night.

I'm guessing they took from 18 to 20 hours.

Blackberry

blueberry

peach

Strawberry

Black cherry

Delicious!!!

Taste kind of like fruit flavored taffy candy

but much healthier

Dehydrated Butternut Squash

5 huge dehydrated  butternut squash fit into 4 pint jars
^^^

Unless their free I'll never again dry pumpkin when squash are so much easier.

^^^
A few weeks ago I bought a huge pumpkin, at 40 cents a pound it cost me $7 and 2 grueling days of work.

Day One:

Time to cut up and cook the  monster

I know that a lot of you bake your pumpkin with skin on and seeds inside but that wasn't possible for me because my oven isn't big enough and neither is my turkey roaster.

^^^

It took me till noon to get it seeded and cut into workable pieces.

I thought I would be smart and steam the pieces but that was taking too long so I ended up pressuring it in my electric pressure cooker, 3 pieces at a time.. 

It was late afternoon before the last pieces were out and cooling so I bagged them up, put them in the fridge for the next day.

Day Two:

Time to remove skins and run through the food processor and then the grueling task of placing in cheese cloth and squeezing, twisting and squeezing to get all the excess water out.  

Late afternoon I finally got it spread onto the dehydrator trays to dry.. and I swear it took longer to dry the pumpkin pulp then it did these squash.

Squash

One day only and same price of 40 cents a pound.

I cut each one in half, scooped out the seeds, laid the halves cut side down on dinner plates and microwaved till done which was an average of 10 to 15 minutes each plate.

Butternut squash is not full of water so no squeezing was needed.

While the next batch was cooking I would scoop the meat out of the slightly cooled prior one and smash it in a bowl with the back of the spoon, when the bowl was full I used the spoon to spread it onto dehydrator trays and in no time at all it was happily drying and the next day it was dry and resting in a zip lock bag waiting for me to jar and seal.

Now isn't that easier?
You can make a pumpkin pie using squash and you'd never know the difference.  It's a fact that the cans of pumpkin you buy in the store is made from squash..
Don't believe me?  Do a search and you will find that Libby is the major producer of the squash they use in the can pumpkin.
Happy eating

Dehydrated vegetable pasta

Three balls of pasta dough

Yellow is dehydrated pumpkin, green is dehydrated collard greens and red is dehydrated tomato paste

All veggies were dehydrated then ground into powder

and then mixed with flour and water

I hand crafted some and used my Kitchen Aid pasta cutters to make fettuccine and spaghetti noodles with the rest

It's all in the dehydrator 

Since I added no eggs or oil this will keep for months stored in a jar or bag

Dehydrating a pumpkin

and making pumpkin powder

This was a first for me, I knew I needed to cook it first then strain and press all the juice out of it.

Got it all cut up

Darn but that's hard work.

Would have been easier to smash it onto the sidewalk

And yes, I saved seeds to be roasted

Thought I'd be smart and use my steamer but only one chunk at a time would fit into it and took 25 minutes to get tender

That was taking way too long and I was getting very sick of looking at all that orange mass sitting all over my counter.

It was time to get er done so I brought out the big boss, my go to when I'm in desperate straits.

My electric pressure cooker

 half the pumpkin fit into the pressure and 11 minutes later it was tender, 22 minutes later the whole pumpkin was done and I was exhausted but still had to pick the goop off the pumpkin seeds..

 As soon as the seeds were clean and I had the pumpkin meat scraped out of their skins I set it to cool and gave up for the day.

Two days later I spread it in my dehydrator, it took all that day and over night to dry but it's done.

Today, the 3rd day I ground it into pumpkin powder using my Magic Bullet

These are half pint jars.. hard to believe that huge pumpkin didn't even make a pint of powder.

Would I do this again?

Probably

Because I'm just stupid enough to do so

Jalapeno Salt

Orange Zest

I'm going to be posting how to's for both of these since I just got through grinding both

Jalapeno salt is both delicious and easy to make.

Grind dried peppers in a spice or coffee grinder or if you own a  Magic Bullet use the grinder blade

You want to grind it as fine as possible, then add a bit of salt and grind a few seconds more to blend.

Do NOT attempt to smell it or trust me you will regret it.

Jalapeno salt is delicious on popcorn and is wonderful to sprinkle on meat or just about anything you want kicked up a few notches.

Orange Zest

This is so easy to make and very expensive to buy

Just a month before I bought my dehydrator I bought a small jar of orange zest at half price $3.49

Yikes!!

Whether you're pealing an orange to eat or planning on drying slices of the orange, I suggest you dry the peels in long strips until their crunchy and break easily.

After they're dry then hand break them into smaller pieces and then grind them like you did the peppers.

I wouldn't recommend grinding them in a wheat grinder because if I'm not mistaken you're not suppose to grind things that are oily and citrus peel has some natural oils in them.  A blender would probably do a fairly good job tho.

Orange zest added to icing is delicious on cinnamon rolls.  Added to yeast breads or zucchini and pumpkin bread, cookies and other baked goods.  I like adding a dried orange slice and some orange zest to a cup of hot tea with honey.

Add extra flavor to Asian orange chicken by sprinkling a bit of zest over top.

Possibilities are endless

Storage

Orange zest will keep up to one year in a lidded jar and up to 5 years or more vacuumed sealed either in a jar or Mylar bag.

Storing my dehydrated jars of food

The 6 environmental  enemies of food storage are

Moisture

Heat

Oxygen

Microorganisms

Light

Pests

Having taken measures to remove moisture, sealing them in oxygen free jars that pests can't get into the only thing left to do is where and how to store them..

I placed tops from old socks over each jar for two reasons.. to keep any light from shinning onto the food and because we live in earthquake country.  The socks will keep the jars from clanking together if we have a tremor.  

They will be stored in my mostly dark cool basement on a shelf, never on a concrete floor.

I wish jars came in full boxes like they use to so I could close the box top down over them.

Cream soup in a jar

Credit for this recipe goes to Perbain on YouTube

Thanks Perbain it's a very good soup.

Cream soup mix

2 cups dry milk

1 1/2 cups corn starch

1/2 cup chicken bullion

4 tablespoons dry onions

2 teaspoons basil

1 teaspoon black pepper

1 tablespoon parsley (optional)

Mix well, I used a whisk

Place 2/3 cups in each quart jar and fill to to top with dehydrated vegetable of choice.  Broccoli, celery, potatoes, mushrooms etc.

A quart jar makes a large amount so if you want it for smaller portions like what comes in a can then use half pints.  That's how I did mine.

Place 1/3 cup of mix in each half pint and fill to top with dry vegetables.

To use, dump mix and veggies into sauce pan, fill jar with water and pour into pan,  stir and cook until the veggies are tender and the soup is thick, if soup gets thick too soon, add a bit more water.

I brought mine to a boil then turned the fire off and let it set a bit to reconstitute the veggies, mostly because I had potatoes in it.. after it was finished cooking I added a half teaspoon butter, it made it much richer.

Here's my bowl of cream of broccoli and potato soup.

I have to say it's pretty darn tasty

Dehydrated orange and lemon slices

I even dried the skins

Ground the skins into zest

The aroma and flavor of homemade zest is far superior to the store bought junk.

Meatless breakfast sausage

There's several recipes on the net for this Second World War recipe so I had to give it a try.

I cut the patty so you could see the texture.

1 cup oatmeal

2 eggs

1 1/2 teaspoons sage

1 1/2 teaspoons fennel

1 1/2 teaspoons Rosemary

1 teaspoon parsley

1/2 teaspoon onion powder

3/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon celery powder

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes

Mix well and let sit 20 minutes

After 20 minutes, shape into patties and brown in hot oiled skillet.

After their browned then add 3 cups of beef bullion broth to the skillet and simmer for 20 minutes

After 20 minutes of simmering then drain liquid off, add oil and brown again.

Now they look more like sausage.

My opinion is they do taste fairly good, a lot like sausage but I personally can tell it's oatmeal and since I'm not a fan of oatmeal in meatloaf it isn't something I'd make on a regular basis.. 

Check it out and see what you think.

Yesterday's Dehydrating bargains

Went to SaveALot and found huge beautiful jalapeno's for $1.29..  got 3 trays going.  the whole bag cost under $2

Mushrooms $1 a pack.. 3 trays of portobello mushrooms

3 trays of button mushrooms for $5

Actually these were put into the dehydrator last night and are ready to come out in about an hour.

Trip to the LDS Cannery

I had been looking for somewhere to buy whole wheat that I could grind myself and accidentally came across the fact there is an LDS cannery in St. Louis and after a phone call found out that they do sell to the public.

They have a lot of items from already ground flour, sugar, instant potatoes, dried carrots, spaghetti, beans etc. but I only bought the 3 items pictured.  

One case of #10 hard white wheat for $18.30.. there's 5 1/2 pounds of wheat in each can at the cost of $3.50 each.

Dry milk 1 lb 12 oz $5.40 this is not instant milk.. I've heard this milk is far superior to the instant.

Sliced dry apples #10 can $9.75 each.

They gave me a taste of the apples and they are so good I bought 2 cans :-)

The good part is their warehouse is only 3 miles from my house.

How to stop food from going to waste

I went to fix some glazed sweet potatoes for dinner to find my package of taters that was bought a week ago looking like this

 

• Pretty nasty eh?

There was no way I was going to let those yummy things go to waste so I peeled all the uglies off, put what I needed for dinner in a slow cooker and placed the rest in my dehydrator.

Look pretty nice now

One problem tho.. just enough to fill one tray.. no way am I running the dehydrator for one tray so out came some carrots and parsnips.  My family loves them roasted..

So now I have 3 trays going.. one taters and two carrots and parsnips.

After I rest a bit I'm going to scrounge around in the freezer for some frozen veggies so I can fill a bit more trays.