I like dried fruit. My kids LOVE dried fruit. Dried fruit is expensive. Raisins are the most reasonably priced. I love the bulk section of Winco for finding things cheaper, but lots of their dried fruit has lots of added sugar and color… not really the healthy snack I was hoping for.
So… what to do? Pick up a dehydrator. My dehydrators came from garage sales for about $10 each. I have two of them. What do you dry on them? Anything you can get cheap or free! Any garden produce over-production.
Examples:
Too many Italian plums from our tree to eat all at once… split in half and dried
Too many pears and not enough jars… cut into slices and dried (you can see pictures of this here: http://breezysunday.com/blog/2011/09/12/too-much-fun/
Apples… put them on a peeler-corer-slicer that suctions to your counter and dry away!
Accidentally got too many strawberries… or they were a little too close to overripe? We dried them for the first time this year and they are delicious!
Blueberries…. run out of freezer space? They’re kind of like raisins
Peaches…. yummmm
I’ve found that apples and pears are the easiest to find free. You don’t have to use prime fruit. Cut out the bruises or worms and save the beautiful, delicious parts. I just picked up 7 lbs of small apples from a local farm for $2.00….. that’s less than $.30/lb. Neighbors with trees that they don’t harvest from may be happy to have you take the fruit away so it doesn’t rot on their lawn! Don’t be intimidated by worms. 🙂
I have about four gallons of dried apples, 1 1/2 gallons of dried pears, 3/4 gallons of dried plums, and a small amount of dried blueberries, strawberries and zucchini.
Because I didn’t want to throw the zucchini out. I’ll put it in soup later.
Pears in the gallon jar on the right. Apples in the bucket and the jar on top of that. Strawberries in the pint jar on top of the jar of dried raspberries…
Now…. good luck remembering this cool idea next summer and fall when you actually have produce around.