Dehydrated Fruit Chips

Dehydrated Fruit Chips. 

The options are really limitless in my opinion. 

But some of my personal favorites:

Cantaloupe: 

The important thing is to use a ripe melon. The dehdration process just makes the flavor stronger, so if your melon is still a little tart and unripe, your chips will turn out tart! (yes I did learn that lesson the hard way.)

So you start by slicing the melon into 1/4" thick slices. Remove the rind and place on your trays.

and go. 

I did mine at 130 degrees for about 10 hours. 

They look like this once done. Delicious and crispy

Watermelon Chips:

Same process. Again super important to use a really ripe melon.

If your watermelon has black seeds, you should remove those. The White seeds you can keep, they are ok to eat.

I used a little melon for my chips, so the final chips are little and round instead of slices.

Optional: sprinkle with some sea salt. That is if you like salt on watermelon. I do so I did :)

Then Plum Chips.
I personally love these. You can take them out a little earlier and have some plum jerky if you like. Otherwise you sohuld probably eat these chips a little faster as they don't tend to stay crispy as long as the melon chips do.
I like to soak my slices in orange juice overnight to give it a plum-orangey flavor, but you don't have to. Plums on their own are pretty tasty anyways.
You don't have to remove the skin, as you can eat it. But you can if you want. The skin gets a little hard, but I personally don't have any problem with it.


 

Stuffed Peppers

Stuffed Peppers

This recipe could not be easier. And the best thing is, if you want to sub an ingrendient, it's so easy. No cooked rice on hand? Use some orzo pasta. Don't have mixed beans? Use a can of black beans, or add more vegetables. Add an onion, add shredded cheese... the options are so limitless.

Here is my basic recipe for vegetarian stuffed peppers. I like to use lentils alot. I feel like they have a meaty flavor and I can typically pass them off as a meat option to my family when I mix them in recipes.

I typically make mine in a crock pot due to the ease of throwing them in and coming home to something cooked and ready to go. An hour for cooking on a weeknight is too much for my son to wait for, so it's nice if it's ready to go.

Dried Strawberries

Seriously delicious and sooooo easy you won't believe me.

Dehydrated Strawberries!

So step 1: Wash then Cut up strawberries into slices. Mine were about 1/4"-3/8" thick.

Step 2: put on tray on dehyradator and go. Mine took 6-8 hours at 135 degrees F.

If you don't have a dehyradator, there is no reason why you couldn't do this in the oven at the same temp.

And voila, dried Strawberries. Yummy. They are actually sweeter dried. The healthiest twizzler taste you can get!

Turkey Spinach Sandwich

Turkey Spinach Wrap/Sandwich

 Ingredients:

8 cooked Turkey Meatball (I used frozen store bought ones)

3 tsp butter

1 small diced onion

10 oz bag frozen chopped spinach (thawed and squeezed dry)

1 tsp garlic powder

1 cup shred cheese (I used Monterey Jack)

4 pitas/wraps whatever you want to use



I put the spinach in a paper towel or a kitchen towel to squeeze all of the water out



Melt butter in skillet. Add onion. Cook until onions are soft. Add spinach and garlic. Cook and additional 2 mins



Cut meatballs into small chunks. Add to skillet. Stir until meatballs are warm.
Stir in Cheese and cook until cheese is melted.



Put into your favorite bread or wrap and eat :)

 If you like mushroms, you could add 2 cups of fresh sliced mushrooms to this. (I personally don't eat them)

I would also serve this with some salsa. Mmmmmm

Christmas Cinnamon Pickles

Okay so a start to the new year, a new recipe. This is a personal favorite sneaky recipe of mine from the holidays.
This recipe is enough for 1 jar because I like to do thing in small batches :)

Cinnamon Christmas Pickles

INGREDIENTS:

1-1/2 ounces large cucumbers

1/2 teaspoon pickling lime (calcium hydroxide)

1/8 teaspoon red food coloring

1/8 teaspoon powdered alum

1/2 teaspoon distilled white vinegar

1 tablespoon and 1-1/4 teaspoons white sugar

1-1/4 teaspoons distilled white vinegar

1-1/4 teaspoons water

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon red hot candies

1/8 cinnamon stick

RECIPE:

Peel cucumbers. Cut the cucumber into 1/4 inch circles and remove seeds (this is totally optional, feel free to cut up however you want) and place into a glass or ceramic crock. Dissolve the pickling lime in about 1 cup of room temperature water, pour over the cucumbers, then add additional water until the cucumbers are covered by 1/2 inch. Let stand at room temperature 24 hours.

         Peeled and deseeded                                                                         Not peeled/deseeded

(look you can pass these off as apples)                                                           (clearly a pickle)

Drain the cucumbers and rinse well with cold water. Place into a large stockpot, and cover with cold water. Allow to stand for 3 hours, then drain and rinse again.

Return the cucumbers to the pot, add the food coloring, alum, 1/2 tsp vinegar, and enough water to cover by 1/2 inch. Bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce heat to a simmer, and cook 2 hours. Once the cucumbers have cooked for 2 hours, drain and allow to cool a bit before placing into the glass or ceramic jar.

Stir together sugar, 1 1/4 tsp cups vinegar, 1 1/4 tsp water, cinnamon red hot candies, and cinnamon sticks in a saucepan over medium heat until the sugar and candies dissolve. Pour this mixture over the warm cucumbers, cover, and let stand overnight.

Pack pickles into pint jar, and process in a hot water bath for 15 to 20 minutes. Refrigerate jars if it does not seal.

(you can see that this batch I didn't remove the seeds/peel. They don't bother me and I was eating them, so knew they were pickles. If you are tricking other people to think it's cinnamon apples you should peel and deseed)

Pumpkin Marshmallows

Fall is in the air. Pumpkins are out, halloween decorations are going up. I just convinced the hubby to let me put our scarecrow out in the front lawn.
The air is a wee bit cold now (ok, I'm in WI, it's frosting at night so super cold).
What is better than snuggling up to a hot cup of cocoa? Homemade marshmallows.
I'm serious, you don't know what a marshmallow is supposed to taste like until you've tried homemade ones. Throw out that bag of store bought crap that you have at home (okay, those are better for campfires) and chow down on these delicious creations.

Yes the recipe is in 2 parts. The instructions are long, but it really is just words/descriptions and not time.

The de-liquiding of the pumpkin. This is actually a vital step in this recipe. If you don't take out the extra moisture from the pumpkin, you marshmallows will not be as light as airy.

So spread the pumpkin out on some paper towels, put more on top and blot away. Repeat.

Bubble, bubble sugar mixture. Bring to temp to get the marshmallows to set up correctly
(side note, be careful with your candy thermometer. I totally broke mine when I was washing it after this recipe.)

A little before/after shot for you. Look how fluffy and light the mix looks.
You will have some problems getting all the marshmallow off the whisk. It's quite sticky. Don't give up! And I bet when you start mixing in the pumpkin you are thinking, seriously this is never going to mix up. It takes about 5 -10 mins to incorporate it all.

  And spread in the pan. Again, this takes a minute or so to get really flat on top.

Look at the color difference from the fresh mix to the set marshmallows.

Finally, chop into whatever shape you want. You can be creative and use a pumpkin cookie cutter if you want, or cut into really small squares for hot cocoa mugs :)

(Yes there is a missing corner piece in my photo.

I had to try them right away just to be sure)

Mmmmm. Tasty.

Stuffed Cabbage Rolls

So the classic stuffed Cabbage Rolls

(Side note, what really makes things a classic? I never once had this growing up, but apparently it's a classic meals. Maybe just here in the Midwest?)

I chose to do mine with Turkey. Mainly because we have someone at work that doesn't eat beef and I was taking them to a potluck. But by all means, if you want to use ground beef or chicken. Be sure to get extra lean meat though, as it cooks in the pot and there is no where for the fat to go.

So I know there are a lot of ways to prepare cabbage leaves. The most common is boiling the leaves. That works very well, but if you happen to have a microwave steamer like me, that is just super easy and must faster.
I have to advise against the freezing method, unless you aren't going to actually eat the cabbage leaves. Yes it does make them easy to roll, but it makes the leaves taste kinda rubbery. Who wants to eat rubber cabbage leaves? Not me!

To peel each leave off, I've found it's easiest by cutting out the core. I've heard it said that if you bash the core on the table, it breaks apart, but I personally prepare these the night before and my kids is usually sleeping and the idea of loudly bashing a cabbage on the counter is just not appealing, so I cut the core out :)

 I don't think I mentioned this in the recipe, so you should cut out the hard white bottom part of the leaf. See Photo!
It's hard to roll and really, I dislike the taste of it anyways.

I said to use about 1/4 cup of mix per leaf, but that is really a rough gauge. The outer leaves are bigger and can take more filling, the inner leaves = less filling. I personally stuff as much as I can inside the leaves

And roll. tuck the corners to keep the filling in and make the rolls pretty sturdy and easy to move.

Finally cooking. You can do this in the oven, but like I mentioned, I'm taking these to a potluck at work, so I'm using a crockpot.

I put the extra cabbage in the bottom of the pan. 1: so that the rolls didn't sit in the fat that came out the turkey and 2: so that if there were weird people at work that wanted more cabbage, there would be some.

Mix up the sauce, pour it over the rolls. And turn your crockpot on. Low and slow if you are doing it for dinner and have 8ish hours, or you can crank it to high if it's a lunch potluck at work.

ENJOY!