Preserving the Harvest

A couple of times a year, I flip through the continuing education offerings of the local community college and the Missouri Botanical Gardens. I've taken classes on investing and financial management, buying a house, fair trade coffee, and even massage (a class which Dan and I took together). Thursday night, I took a class called offered through the Gardens called "Home Plate: Preserving the Harvest," which focused on different food preservation methods, including canning, freezing, and drying.

A complete novice at all methods of food preservation, I was excited to learn about ways Dan and I could preserve the apples we pick every year, the peaches we're hoping to pick next week, the tomatoes of summer, and so many other delicious fruits and vegetables that make their way through our house each season. I cannot say that we always eat seasonally and locally, but we are trying to move more in that direction, and I hoped that taking this class would help us find ways to hang on to some of our summer produce for enjoyment later this year.

The class was quite instructive, providing lecture and demonstrations as well as a take-home handbook filled with tips and recipes. Freezing, of course, was the simplest option if you have the freezer space, which we don't. I feel as though I could get canning down, but we'd have to purchase some equipment, and our kitchen is so small that I question my ability to do it well and to find a place to store everything. We have about three feet of counter space in our kitchen--and that's if we remove the toaster oven. And additional storage space, including space to store a pressure canner and canned food items? Forget it. I'll probably give canning a try for a select few things, but canning on a larger scale won't happen until we move, hopefully to a place with a bigger kitchen!

What I was most excited about was drying food, and I wanted to share this info with you because it seems so easy to do. You can purchase a food dehydrator for $50-100 (I found several on Amazon), and with this you can dry everything from tomatoes to peaches to apples to garlic to mushrooms to corn to. . . you name it. You can either enjoy the food dried (such as peaches) or rehydrate it later (such as corn). If you are a meat-eater, you could also use it to make jerky, and of course it's very useful for drying foods for backpacking or camping(our instructor told us that her husband puts dried vegetables into a jar with some water, allows the vegetables to rehydrate while he is hiking, and heats them later in the evening).

The dehydrator is a circular piece of equipment with trays (pictured below) that uses electricity. I think most dehydrators come with their own recipes, though of course your drying time will depend on how thickly you cut your produce, how dry and crispy you prefer it, etc. You just plug it into the wall, check it periodically, and--voila! Dried produce! We sampled some dried peaches at our class and they were amazing. And the best part is that it was nothing more than peaches--no preservatives or anything besides delicious fruit.

While I'm sure that I will get to canning down the road, I am adding a dehydrator to my wish list pronto. That is, if I can manage to wait for it. With peaches just waiting to be picked--and the memory of those delicious dried peaches still on my tongue--I just might have to buy one right now!