I get asked, quite a bit, why I dehydrate a lot of our stuff instead of canning it. Well let me tell you why. I love that I can make a large batch of sauce and only have to use 1 jar to hold it all. This sauce was about 14+ cups before I dehydrated it. Now instead of using a dozen or so jars, I use one left over (cleaned out) spaghetti jar for the 14 oz. of powder I have. And in this day and age when jars are hard to find and the prices are through the roof, it's even more important to me to conserve where I can. (yes, pun intended) ;)

Once completely dry, break up the sheets of dried sauce into a large bowl and then place in blender or spice grinder. Once ground into powder, place in air tight jar.

To use your sauce from powder: For me, I usually start with the amount of boiling water I want as sauce, and then add a couple tablespoons at a time until the flavor is what I am going for for that dish. Depending on how fine or coarse your powder is will determine the dissolving time. Mine usually only takes about 5 minutes.

Other sauces you can dehydrate: Spaghetti sauce, BBQ Sauce, Picante Sauce / Salsa, Siracha and other Hot Sauces, mustards, etc/

It is not recommended to dehydrate sauces that have a heavy oil or dairy content.

   This years garden season was quite a fun one. Mainly because it was the first garden at our new house. Although, I must admit, I had not planned to have one this year because of the house renovations, full-time job, and elderly dog to take care of. But then I saw some plants on sale at our local market and I couldn’t resist.
   The garden started out quite a bit rocky. A few weeks after I planted everything I went out to the garden and realized that I was not doing a great job at keeping up with the maintenance, the weeds had taken over. So that day I buckled down, pulled the weeds, unburied our plants, put in some paths, covered the bare areas with cut grass and “started again”.
   Not everything did well, and a few plants died… we can’t win ‘em all. But after the garden got established it did pretty well. Thankfully things got ripe at a rate that I could process them and use them up before they went bad.
   I thought it would be fun to put together a list of recipes for the tomatoes and peppers. Feel free to send me any recipes you would like to include in the line up.

   Oh what a beautiful snowy day it is today! Great day to stay home and bake, dehydrate, sew and work on websites. Since I finished the Apples last night (oh they are so tasty), I decided that the bananas were the next on my list. My mind is swirling with all these ideas of what I can do with all this fruit in its dehydrated state. But I don't want to give away my ideas, just yet :). As I was looking at the 9 pounds of bananas that I bought the other day, I couldn't decide whether I should make slices or sticks, so I decided to try both! Here they are in all their naked glory! OH I can't wait until these are done!!!
    *This post was originally posted in October 26, 2011. I am bringing my older post over from my original blog. :)