Hello again, my name is Amber, and I'm a Dehydrator junkie. No for real. This is no joke. I've tried to cut back on how many times I make fruit leather - because no matter how healthy, organic, and natural fruit leather is - when you eat 2 lbs of it in one sitting; it's no bueno! Anyway, like all junkies, I like it when others join me :) So welcome! What does a dehydrator do? It runs at a low temp (lower than your oven will go) to remove the moisture from your food old-school style (like circa 1700's Native American days) drying out and "processing" food for long term storage. My first, and favorite, dehydrated food is Fruit Leather! What is Fruit Leather you ask? Well it's any countless combinations of different fruits, blended up together, poured on a non-stick sheet, and slowly dried out at 135 degrees over ~10-12 hours time. So basically fruit roll ups, but without the additives, chemicals, and "delicious" scientifically manufactured plastic taste. VERSUS I went out and bought my ahhmazing Excalibur Dehydrator and the first thing I made was fruit leather. I probably make it about once a week now and we eat it within 2-3 days. FRUIT LEATHER INGREDIENTS: Any fruit you have laying around the house. We buy/eat a ton of fruit in our house. But sometimes I buy too much and if anything looks like it's getting over-ripe or about to spoil I remove any peels or seeds and throw it in the freezer. So when it's time to start a batch of fruit leather I dig in the freezer and put all my fruit in the blender. This makes me happy, because I'm a miser at heart and food waste kills me. I've never made the same batch of Fruit Leather twice and I've never had a bad batch. I think it's nearly impossible. Some of my favorite combinations are listed below (and I love adding a lime or two to any of these if you like it a little tart). I also buy the big bags of organic frozen fruits from Costco at a bargain and they're usually in pre-mixed varieties. :
Honestly this list could be 100's, 1000's deep. I do any and every combination of pretty much every fruit possible. FRUIT LEATHER RECIPE:
A Few Tips:
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Lemon Cupcakes Cupcake Ingredients 1 stick plus 1 tablespoon soft butter 1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon sugar 2 eggs 3/4 cup all-purpose flour 1/2 teaspoon baking soda 1 teaspoon baking powder 2 teaspoons vanilla extract 2 to 3 tablespoons milk 1 Lemon- zested For the frosting: 2 large egg whites 3 cups confectioners' sugar 1 teaspoon lemon juice 2 tsp Lemon juice (same as above- but you're using the juice) Directions Bring cold ingredients to room temperature and preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Put all of the ingredients for the cupcakes except for the milk into a food processor and pulse until smooth. Add the milk down the funnel, to make a smooth dropping consistency. Divide the mixture between a 12-bun muffin tin lined with muffin papers, and bake in the oven for 15 to 20 minutes. Let them cool a little in their tins on a rack, and then take them carefully out of the tin to cool in their papers, still on the wire rack. Royal Icing: Combine the egg whites and confectioners' sugar in a medium-size mixing bowl and whip with an electric mixer on medium speed until opaque and shiny, about 5 minutes. Whisk in the lemon juice, this will thin out the icing. Beat for another couple of minutes until you reach the right spreading consistency for the cupcakes. Yield: sufficient to generously ice 12 cupcakes * Recipe adapted from Nigella Lawson cupcake recipe, Foodnetwork.com I've been milling my own flours for a few years now. After the first time I tried it, I never went back! When you take a bite of your freshly baked bread that you made from grain - you'll basically die and go to heaven. See the world's best cornbread recipe; starting with actual corn kernels in my blog post here. White flour has been processed, refined, and striped of it's nutrients. Here's how in plain English: Wheat berries consist of three main layers: (1) Bran, (2) Germ, and (3) Endosperm. Nutrients mainly live in the outer layer, the (1) Bran. In milling white flour, this bran layer is the first to be removed. The grain then goes through a second milling to remove the (2) Germ, which also contains nutrients. The end result is the (3) Endosperm which is then milled and often bleached; which makes it filler with few nutrients. . Milling wheat berries and grains at home allows you to keep all the nutrients in the flour. First, let me recommend the book that helped get me started The Homemade Flour Cookbook. Cooking with fresh unrefined flour can be a little more tricky than opening a bag of all-purpose white flour, so a little preparation can be very helpful. Let me give you the long and short of it and save you a few hours. To get started you need a Grain Mill. There are Hand Mill's - but I can't relate to wanting to add manual labor and more time to the cooking process. Unless you want to multi-task and get a work out in while you're cooking - I recommend you pass. The other options are an electric grain mill, a large coffee grinder, or a high-powered blender. I found an electric grain mill on craigslist before I found a coffee grinder or a high-powered Vitamix Blender (which is the most expensive option), so that's what I use. I started with a Blendtec Kitchen Mill that I bought for a steal- that's actually how I met my essential oil sponsor; I bought her flour mill. I've since moved to the KitchenAid Mixer Grain Attachment. Both these mills work great. The main difference is that you can adjust the fineness of the flour from slightly gritty (like for cornbread) to more fine powder for something like baking pastries. I love them both though, either one is fantastic and I highly recommend either one. If you've got a Vitamix or have been looking for the excuse to buy one - here's your chance. They're fantastic for making flour. I've never been able to stomach the price tag, so I haven't used one myself. But I've stared in awe as the Whole Foods employee gave the in-store demo and I've read how well they work milling grains. Why is it great to mill your own flour? Wheat berries consist of three main layers: bran, germ, and endosperm. Nutrients mainly live in the outer layer, the bran. In milling white flour, this bran layer is the first to be removed. The grain then goes through a second milling to remove the germ, which also contains nutrients. The end result is the endosperm which is then milled and often bleached; which makes it filler with few nutrients. . Milling wheat berries and grains at home allows you to keep all the nutrients in the flour. All-purpose flour found in stores comes from wheat but it has had all its nutrients stripped away and has often been bleached to remove any color of what. Now that you've got your mill, it's time to choose your grain.
The above list is a great selection of grains that are fairly easy to find at either Central Market, Whole Foods, or Azure Standard (online). Take your old bread or pasta recipes and switch out the types of flour. My next post will focus on Gluten Free Grains. About three years ago I bought a KitchenAid 5-quart Artisan Stand Mixer. Pretty quickly I started acquiring all the fun attachments that can go along with it. I bought the slicer/shredder attachment, the food grinder attachment, and the grain mill attachment. The grain mill is tied for my #1 favorite - it works so great I started using it more than my Blendtec Kitchen Mill so I ended up giving the Blendtec to my mother since she wanted to start milling her own flour too. The other attachment that is tied for my #1 Favorite is the Pasta Roller and Ravioli Maker. Come to find out, making pasta is actually really easy! The pasta roller attachment comes with a handy little manual with some really accessible pasta recipes. To make an egg pasta it's literally only four ingredients: 4 eggs, 3 1/2 cups flour, 1/2 tsp salt, and 1 tbs water. Egg Pasta Ingredients:
*I like to use flour that I mill myself from organic Durum Wheat Berries; the hardest of all wheat and the most commonly used for pastas. I had a hard time finding these - Whole Foods and Central Market never carries them. I've purchased from Purcell Mountain Farms (Azure Standard has them, but they only sell in bulks of 20 lbs). Mill the Durum Wheat Berries until you get the 3 1/2 cups of Durum Semolina Flour you need. It's confusing - but apparently grinding the grain is a simple form of processing that turns Durum Wheat Berries into a flour called "Semolina Flour," Egg Pasta Directions:
The absolute best lasagna I've ever had was an adapted Martha Stewart recipe using my own homemade lasagna sheets (honestly)! Recipe is shared at the bottom of this post. If you want pasta that's not lasagna, you switch attachments to either the spaghetti, the fettuccine, or ravioli attachments and run the sheets through one at a time. They sell pasta drying racks, but my Uncle in Maine was kind enough to make me one (he's a woodworker). To make ravioli is pretty easy too. You take your pasta sheet (that you flattened up to setting "7") and feed it through the ravioli attachment while pushing in whatever stuffing you've cooked up. There are tons of delicious filling recipes: my favorite is a basic 1 part lump crab + 1 part ricotta cheese (salt and pepper to taste). The one mistake I made on my first batch of ravioli was to make sure you flatten the lasagna sheet the full width of the attachment. Mine was a little thin (because when you do spaghetti or fettuccine it doesn't really matter how wide the sheet it) and the ravioli filling oozed out the 1/2 finished sides. Making ravioli is easy, but it's not as easy to visualize as everything else. There's a good video by Williams Sonoma you can watch that demonstrates it. I've watched pretty much every kitchenAid video on Williams Sonoma's YouTube channel: Martha Stewart's Three Cheese Skillet Lasagna, with some personal modifications in the below recipe (I like to add homemade Italian pork sausage that I grind myself using my sausage grinder attachment; I'll post that recipe in a separate blog) My version of Martha's recipe is better in my opinion - I'd recommend you follow the below: INGREDIENTS
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The day I became pregnant with my first child (Greyson, who's six now) was the day my husband and I switched to organic eating and began on the path to a "traditional cooking" lifestyle. It's all about eating healthy, organic and unprocessed whole foods like our great grandparents did before the food industry went all industrialized corporate on us. Basically I don't want my family eating anything that was made in a science laboratory.
The first step of our adventure was to get educated. We watched a bunch of food documentaries like Supersize me, Fed Up, Food Inc, Ingredients, etc. Once you watch one, your perspective changes pretty quickly. We spend many hours reading books and blogs like 100 Days of Read Food, Traditional Cooking School, etc. Information is one thing, but changing a lifetime of habits is another thing... I worked with a woman in her mid-20's, an electrical engineer, who'd moved to Dallas from Minnesota and casually mentioned that she mills her own grain into flour. That sounded so foreign and odd to me- but kind of cool. I thought on it for a while and I finally just felt compelled to try it for myself. I quickly found the Blendtec Electric Grain Mill and embarked on this new adventure. I went to whole foods and bought a couple of different varieties of grains: Spelt Berries, Wheat Berries, Corn even. "Milling" just means you dump the grains into a blender designed for hard dry grains and fresh ground whole wheat flour comes out the other end. Cornbread is my favorite bread. Martha Stewart has a cornbread recipe (see below) that is out of this world. I've made it for years now and it's made every other cornbread I've had since pale in comparison. So I immediately dumped some corn in my fancy new Blendtec Mill and used my freshly ground corn meal in this ahhmazing cornbread recipe. Perfection is an understatement. That was all it took - I was hooked. Pancakes taste better. Breads taste better. My chocolate chip cookies are famous in my family and it's just the nestles classic recipe. It's only because of all the whole fresh organic ingredients I use that make a big difference. One word to the wise though (which took me quite a few times to figure out) - 100% whole grain flour doesn't rise like multi-purpose white flour. It doesn't have the stretchy network of gluten that forms the structure of bread dough and let's it grow! I made a few of the flattest batches of cookies you ever saw. They actually tasted pretty decent... but they were super thin and sad. So word to the wise - do a 50/50 mix of Whole Wheat and King Arthurs White Whole Wheat Flour in your baking recipes. After playing with different grains and flours, the next step was to use them in fresh made pasta. Which led to making sourdough bread from living yeast. Now I make homemade yogurt. I dehydrate foods - fruits, vegetables, beef jerky. We raise our own eggs and I do my best to make everything from scratch: BBQ sauce, ranch sauce, spaghetti sauce, alfredo sauce, jams, and tons more. WARNING: Once you try anything from scratch you can never eat the stuff from a box or jar again. Seriously - make this brownie recipe and tell me if you'll ever eat boxed brownies again. I'll add one disclaimer to this post. I'm not judging anyone who prefers it a different way, a different taste, a different style. This is just me sharing my cooking journey. Everyone likes food, the way they like it. Sometimes I just don't have time and I make a frozen pizza. I work full-time, I get it. Time is limited and I admit that doing it this way takes more time... but honestly not as much as you might think. Sometimes it really is negligible. Source referenced: * http://phys.org/news/2010-01-chemical-additives-food.html#jCp Martha Stewart's Jalapeno Corn Muffins INGREDIENTS:
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