How Do You Like Your Eggs?

This is almost a sacrilege, I know, but I don't like my eggs "sunny side up."  I don't like my eggs "over easy."  I don't like a runny yolk.  Tricia describes the way I like my eggs is "toasted."  In other words, cooked through.  I like them with peppers and onions in them, spiced up, with cilantro and green onions on top.  I have a good wife that goes through the extra time and steps to prepare for me eggs to my liking.

We eat a LOT of eggs.  Scrambled, Fried, Boiled, and Pickled.  We have lots of hens and pick up multitudes of eggs each day.  We've experimented with several methods of preserving eggs.  One of the ones we showed you was Waterglassing eggs.  We were looking for another method and that's what we'll talk about tonight.

We have been really using the food dehydrator that a friend gave us many years ago.  We have dehydrated more things this year than you could shake a stick at.  So we got to thinking.  Why not eggs?  I've got to admit, powdered eggs do not seem appetizing to me.  I think of school cafeterias.  But with the girls laying "to beat the band," we have to think of new and different methods (to us) of food preservation.  Let's give it a whirl.

To dry eggs in our dehydrator, we'll use our new silicone trays.  We cracked a number of eggs and scrambled with a whisk and then poured on the trays in the dehydrator.  We put the setting on 135 degrees for 6-8 hours.  In just a little bit, they looked like this!:  (Note the dark yellow color of the pastured hens' yolks.)

At the eight hour mark, they looked like this:

We turned off the dehydrator, crumbled the eggs up and poured into an air tight jar.

We will eventually blend into a powder.  Basically, to re-hydrate them, you add one tablespoon dried egg powder to 1 tablespoon hot water and that equals 1 egg.  Simply scramble them to the consistency you like your eggs.  Disclaimer:  We just did this, and have plenty of fresh eggs, so I haven't tasted them yet.  I'm anxious to do so and give a taste test review of powdered eggs.  We'll keep ya posted.

Making Tomato Candy

The tomato crop is about done for the summer.  The heat and the stinkbugs have the tomato plants throwing in the towel.  We had been picking them green, bringing them inside, and putting them in a brown paper bag for ripening.  You can't really vine ripen tomatoes around here once it warms up and the bug pressure gets bad.  Oh, we could solve the problem, I think, if we spray pesticides on the tomatoes, but I don't want to eat pesticides.  Next year, I will do my homework and see if there are any natural products (Neem Oil?) that work on stink bugs.

We still made a nice tomato crop this year and eat them most every day.  Today, we'll show you how we make a great tasting snack that we call "Tomato Candy."  It's very easy and very tasty.  We cut up the homegrown tomatoes into wedges and put them on the trays of the food dehydrator.

We sprinkle them with kosher salt and cracked black pepper.  Then we go to the herb patch and get some fresh rosemary and put the rosemary on top of the tomatoes.

After a few hours, the tomato candy is done.  You can tell that the tomatoes have been dehydrated.  All the water has been removed, leaving the tomatoes concentrated with flavor!

While they're not exactly sun-dried tomatoes, its the same concept.

We store the tomato candy in mason jars and snack on them until they're gone - which doesn't take long!

Drying Figs for a Healthy Snack

Russ' new home has a big fig tree in the back yard.  They have been ripening and he picks well over a gallon of figs every single day.  He's been sharing the wealth with us.  After freezing several gallons for making smoothies later, we began to dry a bunch of them, too.  Once dried, they are shelf-stable and can be placed in a jar or zip loc bag for snacking on. 

Here is a batch of fresh-picked figs all washed up and ready for processing.  You can see that they are ripened to a state of perfection!  They are literally bursting with sweetness.

After washing, we slice off any remaining hard stems and slice in half.  It usually works best if one person slices and the next places the figs on drying trays.

We try to place the figs on the tray to use every square inch of space.  Once dried, they'll shrink up some.

With a little help, it doesn't take long to have all the figs washed, sliced, and placed on drying trays and all ready to be dehydrated.

We pop them in the dehydrator and put them on the fruit setting and leave them drying for approximately 36 hours.  All of the water will be eliminated (or most of it, anyway), leaving nothing but concentrated sweetness and flavor of figs.

They are perfect for snacking on.  The farmer that Benjamin works for dehydrates them like this and sells them at the Farmer's Market.  He markets them as "Fig Candy." 



We place them in a jar for snacking and have two additional batches completed now, so we are filling gallon-sized zip loc bags with "fig candy."

Let's hope this satisfies my sweet tooth!

Drying Herbs

This weekend we wanted to dry some herbs, specifically cilantro.  It comes up volunteer in the garden most years from previous year's crops.  We let some of the cilantro go to seed.  Where the seeds fall, the next year you'll have cilantro sprouting up.  The interesting thing is that the seeds of the cilantro plant are coriander.  Those small ball-looking seeds are used as a spice to cook with.  The plant itself is used to cook with pinto beans, in Mexican rice, in soups, on tacos, and my personal favorite - in scrambled eggs.

There's one problem with cilantro.  At the first sign of warm days, it bolts.  It will go to seed faster than Usain Bolt to the finish line.  In South Louisiana, it is a very short window to grow it.  Sometimes, before it bolts, we harvest it and freeze it in ice cube trays for use throughout the year.  Other times, like today, we'll harvest it and dry it in a food dehydrator on the herb setting.  First, we picked a bunch and washed it up real good.

We snip off all of the leaves for drying.  Usually for cooking, we don't do this.  There is lots of flavor in the stems as well.  For drying, we do cut most of the stems off.

We line the cilantro leaves on the trays of the dehydrator and turn it on.  When you cut up the stems and leaves, the unmistakable scent of cilantro fills the kitchen.  Drying them, however, doesn't really release the scent like I would have thought.  I began to read about this and learned that fresh cilantro is ALWAYS better than dried, because the rich, pungent flavor dissipates when heated or cooked.  Dried cilantro will do in a pinch, but fresh is always better.  I guess I knew this, but we'll dry some anyway for those times when fresh cilantro is not available in the garden.

In no time at all in a dehydrator, the cilantro is dried.  When we are sure the leaves are fully dried, we'll put them in a labeled ziploc bag and hang them for future use in cooking.  I'm interested in trying them out to see if dried cilantro retains some of the flavor that fresh-picked cilantro does.

In addition to mechanically drying in the food dehydrator, I notice that Tricia has a bundle of cilantro hanging to dry naturally on the back patio.  It won't be as fast as the dehydrator, but an experiment to see if we can get the same results with the sun.

More Things To Do With a Bumper Crop of Tomatoes

The 2018 crop of heirloom tomatoes are still coming in.  Numerous varieties.  Some big and fat.  Some little. Some deep, blood-red, some yellow, some orange and some almost black.  I have fun growing them.  Lately, however, when I bring yet another bucket full into the house, Tricia almost groans.

We've canned forty-something pints of diced tomatoes and about the same amount of tomato sauce. 

Tricia makes an Italian tomato salad that she likes and we've made numerous batches of pico de gallo.

Today we'll be drying some tomatoes in the food dehydrator.  It is a simple thing to do.  You simply core out the tomatoes and cut them into quarters and align them on the dehydrator trays.  I pack them in pretty tight.  They will shrink up.

You want to get them close together to make the most of the space that you have.

I'll liberally shake kosher salt over the tomatoes and then I went outside and picked a whole bunch of rosemary.  I skinned the needles off of the rosemary and sprinkled lots of it on top of the cut up tomatoes.

Once I have all the trays prepared and ready, it is time to get them dehydrating.

It takes only about a day for the tomatoes to be dried.  All of the water has been removed and it leaves behind a concentrated flavor of tomatoes, salt and rosemary that is like candy to eat!

We've made several batches.  Once totally dried, we store in mason jars and zip loc bags and snack on them.  I'm not a big fan of raw tomatoes, but dried tomatoes are quite good.

We have a few jars of dried seasoned, herbed tomatoes put aside and many more on the way!

The smaller tomatoes actually make the best dried tomatoes. 

Drying Sweet Potatoes

We are approaching the end of our inventory of sweet potatoes that we harvested back in the fall. There's only a portion of a milk crate left.  Naturally, the biggest ones get eaten first as they are easier to peel.  We like to roast them, make mashed sweet potatoes, make sweet potato fries, bake them, and make sweet potato latkes out of them.  What else can we do with two medium sweet potatoes and a long, skinny one?

Well, let's get the dehydrator out and dry some sweet potatoes.  First, we have to get the food processor out and put on the slicing blade.  It takes no time to transform the sweet potatoes into something that resembles orange potato chips.  In about 12 hours they'll look even more like potato chips except they won't be fried.

Once they are sliced, you soak them in a bowl of water for a couple of hours.  This draws the excess starch out of them.  Make sure they are all wet by stirring them around from time to time while you wait.

After an hour and a half or two hours, take them out of the water bowl and shake the excess water off of them and then put them on a dish towel and pat dry.

Place them on the dehydrator trays and brush them with a light coating of coconut oil.  I'm wondering if this step could be sped up by putting them in a container and shaking them with coconut oil, but maybe the time saved would be offset by the time it takes to clean the container?

Then sprinkle the sliced sweet potatoes with cinnamon and flip them over and do likewise on the other side.

Put the trays on the dehydrator and turn the setting to 145 degrees Fahrenheit and allow them to dry for 10-12 hours.  You'll be surprised at how much they've shrunk, but all the flavor has condensed into sweet sweet potato chips.

We store them in a mason jar.  (But we don't have to store them for long!)