Saturday, January 17, 2009

DRYING AND PLANNING




The push is on.

Each tray is 13 inches diameter. This is about 4 pounds of carrots and 3 pounds of cabbage, lightly precooked (to stop enzyme action that could cause spoilage even in fully-dried food) and ready to go into the dehydrators. Each tray is 13 inches diameter; one dehydrator holds 4 and the other, 5.

I have a list of what I will need to finish dehydrating and bag up in the next 10 weeks, based on a 6-month or 24-week trip:

12 cups dried measure of each of the following:

  • Carrots
  • Cabbage
  • Corn
  • Broccoli
  • Green beans
  • Turnip/collard greens (yes, I like these, and yes, they rehydrate well!)

This will give me 1/2 cup dry = 1 cup reconstituted per week of each... a different vegetable each day for 6 days. The seventh day I plan to eat in town.

That's just the vegetables. I'll be mixing them with:

  • Dry beans (need 24 cups dry measure = 1 cup per week = 2 X 1 cup rehydrated.) I buy them dry, soak & cook, dehydrate, and end up with "instant" dry beans. I'm not drying any more of them, though, since I discovered that lentils and split peas, after soaking 3-4 hours, cook in 5 minutes. I'll put them into a jar with water at lunchtime and heat them up for dinner.
  • Brown rice (I'll need about 5 pounds for the same number of servings; soak & cook like lentils)
  • 24 cups tomato sauce = 1 cup per week; I'll dry it and flake it in the blender and divvy it up; it's less expensive than 72 tomatoes (3/week)
  • 8 pounds hamburger = 1 serving/week of 1/3 pound
  • 8 pounds ground turkey = 1 serving/week of 1/3 pound
  • Onions -- however many it takes to make 6c. dried minced onions

Then there's fruit. I don't have this fully-planned yet. Just something to mix into my oatmeal, basically. Probably:

  • Applesauce "leather"
  • Banana slices
  • Maybe pineapple rings

That's just the stuff I'm going to dry myself.

So my dinners will include a couple servings of meat a week; complete protein the other days from the beans/rice mixture, plus cheese (buy en route); and a different vegetable every day, along with onions and tomato sauce.

I'll save breakfast, lunch, and snack plans for another post.

~Sigh~


I'm tired just from making the list. Burned up a pound of calories right there, I think.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dried Black beans also don't take a long soak period. I threw some in a pot the other day and was surprised to find them soft after only half an hour of cooking. I should think soaking them a few hours would also cut down on the actual cooking time.

Did you know you can get dried butter, and dried cheese? We've bought 5 lbs cans of the stuff, some of which we sent off with linguistics working in a very remote area.

A favorite camp breakfast of ours is to toast the raw oatmeal then stir in sunflower seeds, flax seed, dried cranberries or blueberries (last 3 high in antioxidants) a bit of brown sugar and salt, toast a few more seconds then pour in just enough hot water to moisten the batch. Delicious! You can get quite creative depending on what's at hand.

A Wild Celtic Rose said...

"and on the 7th day, she went to town"

That made me giggle.

I have to start thinking about this stuff Pronto.

Tom and I have to get our cache for the Grand Canyon trip in the mail next Monday and I've got to get 5 1/2 days of food that doesn't leave much trash and can be stored in a plastic bucket under a rock next to the Colorado River in there...

Tammy said...

You are going to eat healthier on this "hike" than I do at home! When you get back, will you create healthy meals and mail them to me? :)