Vibrant Moms

>>With the price of gas being what it is, is it really worth making a 2-3 hour trip to shop really worth it? >>

Well, let’s look at the numbers.   If I get 13 miles to the gallon, then I need 15 gallons for the entire day (it’s 100 miles in each direction).  With gas now at about 2.50 a gallon, it works out to $37.50.  So I need to save at least that amount before I start to benefit.  I gave the example of having saved over $110 when I bought three bags of wheat.  I don’t buy wheat every month (can’t eat nearly that much in a month!), but everything I buy is significantly less than it would be if I bought locally, not on sale.  (That’s not to say that everything is much cheaper, but that the things I buy are much cheaper.) I started buying 5 gallon buckets of coconut oil when I do my big shopping (it’s an item the store doesn’t carry but specially orders for me) - the shipping that I used to pay for one bucket was about $40.  And of course, I get much, much more than just one item - we have a 12 passenger van, and I remove one bench seat before I go.  The van is generally packed full when I get back - that’s why it takes me part of the following day to get everything unpacked and organized!

I wonder how much people spend on their gas costs for their small trips every couple of days to the store?  Most people don’t think about there even being costs associated with it, but whether they think about it or not, they’re still spending that money on gas and shopping.  I think that’s it’s highly likely that most women spend just as much as I do on gas each month with shorter but more numerous shopping trips - but spend a lot more time in the stores than I do.

However, it’s in large part due to the gas costs (and time needed) that my shopping trips have become more and more spread out.  At this point, I go shopping about every 7 weeks instead of every four, and supplement in between the big trips with small local trips every couple of weeks.  So the gas costs are really much less significant than it seems even from the number I gave.

>>I have an Amish area about 2.5 hours away but that takes a day away from regular life (school, hanging out, etc) and everyone’s tushies get tired from being in the car for that long (even with our audio books and torah tapes).<<

 I don’t see it as taking a day from regular life as much as it being a day of regular life.  I try to do some kind of trip on that day, when I can - like going to a living history museum, a chocolate factory, potato chip factory, dairy.  It doesn’t always work out but the kids enjoy going with me anyway.  I can’t say exactly what they enjoy about it - a friend came with me once and I know it seemed boring to her from a kid’s perspective.  One thing the older kids said they like is having a long block of time to shmooze with me, which is why I don’t generally agree to have anyone come with me.  I generally buy some kind of treat for everyone, in addition to buying something for lunch and then (weather permitting) we have a mini picnic.  It’s generally pretty simple but the kids enjoy it. 

>>In buying bulk, do you worry about bug infestation and how do you store everything?<

Bulk grains are put into the freezer for 24 hours, sometimes more.  When it’s the winter time, this is greatly simplified by storing them on the stairs leading from my basement to outside that are covered by storm doors - that freezes them very quickly.   If there are any insects in it, they will be killed by this.  In the summer I find this much harder to do - I only have one freezer and generally need the space for perishable foods.  But whether the grains are frozen first or not, I transfer them from the bags they came in to food grade plastic buckets (most are five gallon, but the rectangular ones I prefer are a bit smaller).  They seal tightly and can be stacked somewhere in the corner of your laundry room or basement.  It doesn’t take up much space. 

Avivah

>>about dehydraters- is there a substantial difference in what you use a deyhdrater for versus what you would use a vaccuum sealer for? i am fairly certain that at some point you researched this, so i am trying to not reinvent the wheel. is there a reason you chose one over the other? <<

I looked into getting a vacuum sealer at one point and didn’t see a need for it.  I might not understand well how the two work, but I’m under the impression that a dehydrator and vacuum sealer are two distinctly different appliances with different applications.  The dehydrator dries your food as a preservation technique, and the vacuum sealer sucks the air out of the container that you store something in, thereby creating a tight seal that will keep your food fresh long term.   

>>as far as a dehydrater, i have done a lot of reading in magazines (like mother earth news, natural living, etc) and they seem to say that an electric dehydrater should only be a first step until you can handle a solar one. …. so, do you have any ideas about what would be a good intro dehydrater? i don’t want to spend a bunch, in case i don;t use it so much, but i don’t want a super junky one either, since the one i buy will most likely be the one i have for as long as it lasts. what factors should i look at before i decide? i read your posts on this, but i feel like i need a bit more guidance…<<

I think their point is philosophical and ecological, and I agree that solar dehydrating is good to do when you can.  If I could, I’d love to have non-electrical alternatives for all my appliances.  But solar dehydrating has its limits - like the weather!  And it takes a lot more time.  I need the reliability of a dehydrator that will do what I need, when I need, at a predictable rate.  I live where humidity can be high in the summer, which affects drying time.  I’ve wondered if I put my dehydrator in the sun if it would work well - I’d probably have to play around with leaving the door off to adjust for air flow.

As far as what to start off with, there are two ways of thinking about this.  The first is, buy something cheap and see if you use it enough to justify buying something more expensive.  That’s not my position.  I had a cheapie dehydrator and it was inefficient, the results were uneven and poor, and I’d never consider dehydrating valuable or worthwhile if I were still using something like that.  So I think, decide if dehydrating is something you’ll do a good amount of based on your research about it, and then get a good deal on something good that you can use and enjoy using for a long time. 

Basically, a dehydrator is just a box with a heat source and a fan to circulate the air. Be sure that whatever model you get has a fan since without it, you’ll have to constantly rotate the trays and your results still won’t be even.  Get one that has a thermostat so you can control the temperature (different foods dry at different temps). A timer is a nice feature but not necessary.

I chose the 9 tray Excalibur, which has an excellent reputation.  I got a very good buy on it because I got a factory reconditioned model with a ten year warranty for $150.  But I know that this is still a lot of money and many people won’t consider that affordable. 

American Harvest and Nesco are supposedly decent inexpensive alternatives (keep in mind the suggestions above about being sure to get a model with a thermostat).  Absolutely avoid ronco, which is a piece of junk; I’ve heard very little positive feedback about it.  There’s a pretty new dehydrator out on the market called Good 4U which looks interesting; good price and seems to be good quality.  My concern with that one is that there’s no door because of the tray design so you’d have to have all the trays in all the time, and you couldn’t use it to let dough rise or make yogurt (which I haven’t yet done but many people do). 

In the end I think getting something you can use long term is actually a more frugal strategy than getting something cheap and later getting something that really works the way you want it. Junk just isn’t a savings, not in time and not in money.

Avivah  

Today I planned to go pear picking, but my boys came home from shul and told me on the way home they looked at the tree I had gotten permission to pick- and it had been stripped clean!  It had been loaded less than two weeks ago.  I didn’t pick them right away since I was waiting for school to start so my kids wouldn’t feel uncomfortable having lots of people watching them (it’s in a busy area).  And then I couldn’t pick them right before the camping trip because we were busy packing up.  Well, as the saying goes, opportunity waits for no man.  It’s a good reminder - if you find a good deal, or a good opportunity, don’t sit around assuming that it will be there for you when you feel like moseying around to it!

The boys also checked on the apple trees we picked from last year - hardly a fruit on the trees.  Later in the day I drove by another apple tree we picked that I was positive no one else would have picked from - nothing. I’m pretty sure that all these apple trees were hit by the late frost, just like the three pear trees we picked last year, and that’s why there’s no fruit.

So I decided to see if we could go fig picking, and that worked out beautifully!  We picked about 4 gallons of gorgeous figs - soft and delicious.  None of us had ever had fresh figs before.  Dh told me when I got home that the gemara says that fig trees have several different ripenings, which is exactly what I noticed when picking - half the fruit on the tree was hard and green and won’t be ready for several more weeks, and half were soft and juicy.

Since figs are so perishable, I wanted to deal with them right away.  Truth be told, I’m very sure that if I had left them around for a couple of days, the kids would have snacked them away.  But I didn’t want them to disappear with nothing to show for our trip, so I tried some new things.  First of all, I made fig jam, just honey, lemon juice, figs, and chopped walnuts.  It was more like a conserve technically, since it had fruit and nuts, but the recipe I used said ‘jam’.  Everyone loved it, but I didn’t think it looked attractive in a jar, which is too bad, since it is so delicious it would make a nice Chanuka gift.  But if it doesn’t look pretty, who would venture to open it up and try it?  So we have four pints for our family to enjoy.

Today I pulled up a bunch of plants from the raised beds to make room for some fall planting, including a lot of oregano and sage (which smelled amazing).  I put all of it into the dehydrator, and since there were some empty trays, decided to fill one tray with halved figs.  I didn’t want to dry all of them because dried fruit gets eaten up very quickly and it’s almost disheartening to see so much fruit being turned into such a small amount.  For veggies, it’s great because I cook them and they rehydrate, but the fruit is mostly used for snacks, and I don’t like watching it disappear so fast. :)  One tray doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s 14 inches square and holds a nice amount.  I’ll see how that turns out in the morning.  So drying the figs was the second way I preserved them.

Since the fig jam called for honey, it isn’t something that everyone in my family will eat, so I wanted to make something that didn’t use sugar or honey.  I looked through lots of recipes online but didn’t find anything.  So once again, I ended up making up my own recipe. :)  I cooked a mixture of rhubarb, strawberry, and chopped figs, added a can of orange juice concentrate to it (would have preferred apple but didn’t have that), and then stirred in a box of pectin for low sugar recipes.  We have 3.5 pints of that.  It still doesn’t look as vibrantly colored as I’d like, but I guess I have to accept that unless I use some artificial ingredients, the fruits I used all cook into less distinct colors than they started out with. 

And that’s the end of the figs!

Avivah

Ds10 got back at 10:30 last night, and at 8 this morning, dd14 set off for several days of backpacking with four other girls and one adult.  I sometimes long for when everyone was young and doing the same thing at the same time - things that used to be very easy, like eating meals together or enjoying a family read aloud, now require conscious effort and planning.  So it will be a few more days before we all are together at the same time!

But don’t think I’m complaining - I’m very glad dd has this opportunity since it’s just the kind of thing she enjoys.  She’ll be spending three days and two nights on the Appalachian Trail.  Each girl is carrying all her food and supplies for the trip with her, so they need to pack light.  Yesterday I asked dd what the plan for the meals was, and she said that each girl was bringing enough of something for everyone.  For example, dd packed 24 packets of grits for breakfast, someone else is packing an equal amount of instant oatmeal, yet another girl will bring macaroni and cheese packets for dinner. They’re going to have a pot to boil water and a filter to get water as they go along, so that is the only cooking capacity they’ll have.  As I was listening to her, I was thinking that it didn’t sound incredibly well balanced to me.  Fortunately, I have a good supply of nuts and home dehydrated fruit I was able to tell her to take from so I didn’t need to run out at the last minute to buy her special food items.  As she was packing, it occurred to me that she could take some dehydrated veggies also.  Then the idea flashed though my mind that we could make her dehydrated meals to take!

So this is what we did yesterday.  We made a quick menu plan for three breakfasts and three dinners (they won’t be stopping for lunch so she packed nuts and dried fruit that she’ll be able to eat as they hike).  We decided to include cheese chunks with grits for breakfast for two mornings, and made a homemade instant oatmeal mix for her using quick oats, organic milk powder, dried apples (that we picked ten days ago), and some cinnamon.  She doesn’t generally eat sugar but someone who wanted to could add sugar or sucanat. 

Then we turned our attention to the dinners.  I had hamburger rocks that I made several weeks ago (dehydrated and canned ground meat) that I initially thought I could include.  But she said that they were planning dairy dinners, so I shifted away from meat ideas.  At first she thought she’d be gone for three nights so we prepared for three dinners, but in the end they’ll be back in the evening in time for dinner at home.

For the first dinner she’ll have fish, mashed potatoes, and cooked vegetables.  I had in my pantry some vacuum packed envelopes of salmon and tuna (bought for .50 each instead of 3.29), so she took one of those.  It’s about 4 ounces so it’s good for one portion.  She cooked mashed potatoes, making them watery so they’d be able to be spread thinly on a paraflexx sheet to dry.  Then she cooked up a couple of boxes of frozen mixed vegetable and spread them on another sheet to dry.  This is different from how I dehydrate vegetables for cooking use- what I’ve dried is intended to be rehydrated by cooking and hot water wouldn’t make them soft enough.  Apparently when making instant meal kinds of foods, the trick is to first cook the food, then dehydrate it, and then use hot water and ten minutes in a covered dish to rehydrate it for eating. 

That was dinner one.  Then dinner two was chili with cheese.  She made the chili and dehydrated it.  Then she cooked up more veggies - she made a batch of peas and another batch of mixed vegetables - and dried those.  We also cooked and dehydrated brown rice for another meal (was supposed to be eaten with albacore steak and vegetables)- even though she won’t need the food for a third dinner, I suggested to her that she take it just in case.  I don’t like the idea of sending her out on a trail with exactly the amount of food she’ll need - it’s good to have a little extra to be better prepared for eventualities. Hopefully everything will rehydrate as planned and she’ll be able to have well balanced food on the trail.

We had fun preparing the foods.  Dd said she hopes that the other girls aren’t jealous of her!! (They won’t be, I’m sure - if she was loaded down with chocolate, that would be something else!)   I’m telling you, it’s so liberating to be able to make things like this at home!  Now we’re starting to prepare for our annual camping trip next week (we usually go the last week of May but this week we had a week old baby so the plan obviously was adapted :)), and we’re considering if there would be a value in doing something like this on a larger scale for our family.

Avivah

We got the new keyboard right after our phone lines went out due to some faulty wiring.  Hopefully dh will be able to fix it tonight or tomorrow but I decided to go to the library to use their computers so I wouldn’t be uptight about when the repair happens and can be a smiling and patient wife when he walked in the door.  I don’t have very positive thoughts about the internet usage at the library (since the library has a handful of people looking for books but the computers are always taken), but I’m grateful now for the ability to connect with all of you even though my home computer is down.  This isn’t very easy, though, since the person right next to me is using his time to look at very revealing pictures of plus sized large chested women and I’m really having to try hard not to use any peripheral vision.  It’s kind of distracting and very unpleasant.  I can’t believe people aren’t embarrassed to have others see what they’re watching.

On one hand it’s been challenging not having easy computer access for a week - the hardest thing has been not being able to post here since that’s something I love to do!  But on the other, it’s been liberating.  I’ve been more present emotionally for my family, gotten more done around the house, and most importantly, gone to sleep lots earlier!!  I’m going to hopefully use this as a reminder to be more careful to limit my online time and focus on doing what I really need to do.  It’s easy to get drawn into all the info out there, especially when there are so many things to learn about….

I have lots of things to post about but very limited time (31 minutes left), so I’ll catch you up on what’s going on in our house this week.

My oldest ds came home from camp yesterday afternoon.  Like dd14 a few weeks ago, he’s spent most of today sleeping.  She took at least a week of sleeping for hours later than usual to get back into her regular routing. This reminds me of the sleep needs of infants - I don’t think adults and infants are very different in this - we all need a certain amount of sleep and when we don’t get it, we need to either make it up or we get crankier and crankier. 

Ds16’s birthday was July 4 but we didn’t make much of a big deal about it, and then when dd13 had a birthday on Aug 4, we also didn’t do much.  Tonight we’re having a surprise birthday dinner for them both.  Dd is particularly difficult to surprise - she notices every single tiny thing that’s a little different.  She had a sleepover at my inlaws a couple of days ago so dd14 baked the brownies for her then and prepared the french fries - and of course dd13 came home and commented on a pan being in the freezer that wasn’t there before!  I bought a cheesecake for ds (he loves cheesecake) and we’ll have pizza, onion rings, french fries, and salad for dinner.  We’ve done what we can to keep dd from catching on, but we’ll see if tonight we actually manage it or not. 

Tonight would be the first dinner in almost 2 months that we would all be here for, except for the fact that ds10 is away.  He was invited on Sunday evening by a friend to go to Indiana with them first thing the next morning, and I shocked ds by immediately agreeing that he could go.  He’s having a great time. 

This week I’ve canned peaches (bought three cases of 24 lb each for 9.50 each on my shopping day last week) and peach fruit spread. I wasn’t happy with the fruit spread - I used frozen strawberries that I didn’t realize came from China and they were terrible.  I’ll have to check where the frozen fruits and vegetables come from, from now on.  The strawberries were tiny and a lot hardly had any color - I should have just composted them but I didn’t and I won’t make that mistake again.

Today I’m dehydrating pears that we picked last week.  They’re now very soft and ripe so they should be very sweet when dried.  I also have a basket of apples that the kids picked on Thursday when we out for our shopping day.  I have to decide what to do with those since they are rather tart.  They are HUGE - I was amused when I was told they are called Rambos.  They are very appropriately named - each apple is at least 1 - 2 pounds!

Avivah

I love having the ability to preserve food!  It’s very fun to be able to find a way to use any amount of food that comes our way. :)  Yesterday I dried a load of yellow summer squash - we were given a box of them when the person who got them realized they were so perishable that they’d go bad before they could use them and didn’t want to wait for that point so they passed them to us; I still have enough to do another half load in the dehydrator.  We dried four trays as slices, since the kids like to snack on them, and six trays with chopped pieces, since that’s the way I use it most frequently for cooking.  I’ll do the rest of them chopped.  It will nice when the winter comes, to add a taste of summer to my dinners.  Right before the squash I dried the last of the peas and carrots I had in the freezer, to get them out of the way. 

Today we went pear picking and got loads of delicious pears.  (Thanks, Alisa!  Your kids were a great help and a pleasure to spend time with!)  Fruit picking is a wonderful family activity, and I love being able to do it locally and for free rather than driving forty minutes away to pay for the experience.  I put a large wooden basket of them in the basement (where it’s cooler) for eating fresh, and will load the dehydrator with some before I go to sleep.   Last year when we got a lot of free pears we found that the kids really enjoyed them dried - it’s hard to dry them fast enough to keep up with their ability to eat them!  This time I’m not bothering with peeling them or deseeding them - we’ve sliced them thinly and put them on the trays at 135 degrees; they’ll be ready when I wake up in the morning.  As they ripen more I’ll probably want to can some, too.   Dh liked having them canned, so there’s something for everyone. 

Tomorrow I’m taking the kids to a Hands On History Day at a historical museum.  I scheduled my monthly shopping trip to coincide, since the museum is somewhat in the area of where I’ll be going.  This museum day is the main reason I haven’t been in eight weeks (I didn’t want to go during the Three Weeks and it didn’t make sense to go right after Tisha B’Av and then to go again now for this trip).  After a few hours at the museum, we’ll do some shopping.  It will be nice to stock up again, and if I find some good produce bargains I’ll then have more dehydrating in my immediate future!

Avivah

Until recently, it never occured to me to dehydrate any of the juicy fruits, like melons.  But I someone online mentioned doing it, and figured I could try it, too!  This was very easy and the kids really like the results - we call it watermelon candy.

Basically, all you do is this: cut the watermelon away from the rind, then slice it about 1/4 inch thick.  Make sure you use seedless watermelon since the seeds don’t enhance anything in the final product!  Put it in the dehydrator at 145 degrees (that’s the fruit setting on the Excalibur).  It will take longer than most fruits because it has such a high percentage of water, somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours. 

When it’s done, it will be very thin and chewy, like a piece of fruit leather.  Because all the juice has been dehydrated, the flavor is strong and very sweet.

After slicing up the watermelon for dehydrating, I decided to use the rinds to make pickles with.  I wanted to make it today but dh took the van to the mechanic to check out why the starter fuse keeps blowing out before I could go to the store for more vinegar, so I’ll have to wait another day. Then I chopped up the final bit of rind and instructed ds10 to bury it deep in the part of the garden beds that are unplanted, where it can break down.  Not a bit of garbage left from the entire thing!  And I even maximized the electricity being used to run the full dehydrator - dd8 made paper yesterday, so I had her put her paper pulp on top of the dehydrator, where it dried very quickly with no extra expenditure of time or energy!

We still like fresh watermelon, and economically it’s a better buy to eat it fresh than dehydrated.  But it’s fun to experiment, especially when the experiments are successful!

Avivah

Today I was soaking some empty food jars I had saved (peanut butter, mayonnaise) to get the labels off so I can reuse them for canning.  That’s the best kind of recycling, don’t you think? :)    Then I soaked several more that I was given last week - I got six dozen jars for free, and about six of them had labels on them.   When I glanced in the box and noticed that, there was a feeling of, ‘oh, not real canning jars, but they’ll come in handy anyway’.  But it was really interesting to see that after I soaked the labels off, they were literally identical to Atlas mason jars in every regard, including the name of the canning company on it!  Then I remembered reading something posted by a long term canner about this, who always buys the spaghetti sauce in a jar made by a particular company (wasn’t kosher) because she gets the sauce along with a free canning jar. So while these particular jars were about ten years old, it’s still possible to get canning jars after eating up the supermarket foods that they contain.

As long as the glass jars fit the standard canning jar lids, you can use them for canning, in addition to storing anything that you find helpful.  In addition to using them for canning, I also like using glass jars for storing my dehydrated foods, grains, and other pantry items, so they come in handy.  

Some will say that you can only use jars that were specifically manufactured for canning, and that it’s unsafe to use other jars.   When I read this a few days ago in a local newspaper, I also noted a recommendation from the same writer to never reuse canning jar bands - because it’s not safe.  I don’t like when people feel they have to err on the side of caution to the point that everything becomes off limits and has warnings on it, even when it makes no sense.  The recommendation to throw away bands after one use unnecessarily brings up the cost of canning and is wasteful - I commented to my kids that anyone following that advice would at least be doing their part to stimulate the economy, since the ones to benefit from the suggestion are the companies that manufacture canning lids/bands.  And the writer also commented that canned goods have to be stored with the bands on them, which is exactly the opposite of what you’re supposed to do.

Is it actually unsafe to reuse jars that mayonnaise or peanut butter come in?  Though this is frequently cited as a safety issue, I don’t believe it is.  I’ve seen a number of people who have been canning for years post online about their experience with used canning jars.  All of them have said they haven’t noticed a difference between the breakage rate of used glass jars and specially made canning jars. Some have noted that the canning jars are in some instances thinner than the recycled jars.  Some have said that they’ve taken the precaution of only using those jars for water bath canning versus pressure canning, which makes sense to me, if you feel the mayonnaise jars are made of thinner glass and wouldn’t be able to stand up to the higher pressure. 

I’ve had jars break in the canner during processing, but all of those that broke were standard canning jars.  That happened in my early days of canning, and it was my inexperience in canning that lead to that, not a defect in the jars.  So far I haven’t made any attempt to treat the recycled jars differently than the canning jars, and haven’t had any breakage issues with them. 

I also like the ‘twofer’ aspect of buying food in glass jars and then being able to use the packaging the food came in.  Unfortunately, so many foods now come in plastic jars that it’s not as easy to find glass jars to recycle! (And the kosher companies don’t use standard sized jars for the most part - all those gefilte fish jars weren’t helpful when it came to canning.  But I did use them to give Chanuka gifts in, so they were still useful. :))   These particular jars came from a health version of mayo and the others from organic and sugar free peanut butter; I think that the healthier items tend to be packed in glass rather than plastic.

After soaking off the labels, I spent a very long time in the kitchen kashering used canning jars that I either purchased or was given.  The jars I bought several months ago were mostly still unkashered, so when I got this latest batch of six dozen, it was an incentive for me to get myself busy to clear the backlog.  I was getting tired after seven or eight dozen, and then noticed that my ds16 had kashered 4 dozen instead of the two dozen I thought he did (he marked the boxes a few months ago when he did them), and washed another couple of dozen in preparation for kashering (washing them is a chore since they have to be spotless and that’s not always easy).  Tonight when I write him a letter (since he’s in camp) you can be sure I’ll be thanking him for that! 

I still have another four dozen to go, but decided to have mercy on myself and call it quits for tonight.  Tomorrow I hope to toivel them, along with a bunch of new lids.  (Rav Heinemann told us we have to toivel the lids, even if using them one time - and since I’m going with his psak on kashering used jars, I have to go along with that, too! :))  Since I have at least twelve dozen to toivel, that will be an activity.  Good thing it’s not a busy time of year for this kind of thing; can you imagine the line I’d cause if I was doing this around Pesach time?!

If you’re wondering how many jars I have by now (Julie, you’re keeping track better than me!), I really have no idea.  It doesn’t seem like so many.  But I decided today that though a person can say that they never can have too many canning jars, I have an excess of the half pint size (some of you may remember last summer when I bought more than 30 dozen in that size, all brand new)- it’s not practical for my family at all since it’s so small; it’s like a one person serving!  I think I’ll sell them or take quart or pint sized jars in exchange. 

Avivah

I did something new this week!  Okay, so that’s not so unusual, but it’s still the first time I did it! 

About two or three years ago, I soaked, sprouted, and then dehydrated the wheat in the oven.  Oh my gosh, that was so laborious and I wasn’t happy with the end product after all of that time and effort at all.  So much so that I still have some of that wheat that has yet to be used, and not because I haven’t used much wheat.  Actually, at the rate I use wheat, I’ve gone through a number of fifty pound bags since then.  Because I felt it was a lot of energy to spend on something that didn’t give me much satisfaction or seem worthwhile, I resolved to spend my scads of excess time doing something more useful.  Until this week.

Thanks to a comment made here regarding soaking nuts back when I said it hadn’t been successful for me, I tried it again at that time and then used the dehydrator to dehydrate them.  Well, that made all the difference -  the results were great and I’ve soaked and dehydrated nuts successfully a number of times since then.

Remembering that, I thought that maybe using the dehydrator to dry the sprouted wheat would work, since it was the dehydrating aspect that didn’t work well for me.  I soaked a large amount of wheat and within a day, thanks to the warm weather and my non air conditioned indoor climate, the sprouts were visible.  I was surprised at how much wheat I was able to fit on the nine trays of the dehydrator - everything I had soaked fit easily.  The wheat dried in much less time than I expected, too.  When I got the dehydrator, I never expected it to come in handy in all the ways that it has - and if I was willing to use it for meat or dairy foods, I’d really be able to expand on the possibilities!

My reason for soaking the wheat is this: there are two ways to use flour that neutralizes the phytic acid. One is by soaking the flour, the other is by sprouting the wheat.  Until now, I’ve been soaking the flour.  But sometimes I don’t remember to soak the flour for something the night before, and it would be very time efficient to be able to prepare a lot of sprouted wheat in advance, so that I’d have it ready when I needed it.  Then all I’d have to do is grind it up right when I wanted to use some.

In the past, the sprouted wheat had a different consistency than regular wheat, so I don’t think this is something that will give me the same results in baking that I’m used to.  However, for quick breads, muffins, pancakes - that’s mostly what I soak the flour for - I think it should work pretty well.  I’ll be trying it the next couple of weeks and seeing how it works out.

Avivah

Yesterday I did some canning.  We were getting low on the homemade jam we made back in January, and since I recently found frozen strawberries on sale for $1 lb, it was a good time to make a batch to replenish our jam supplies!  We used ten pounds of strawberries and 2 cans of juice concentrate, which came out to 14 half pints and 4 pints of jam.  It looks a little liquidy, but last time I made it, it also looked like that and it then solidified over time.  Hopefully this will do the same - I’ve read that it takes about a week for jam to set.  If it doesn’t, we’ll use it as a thick syrup instead of a jam, and that will be fine, too.

Then I canned cherries.  I bought 20 pounds on Friday when I saw the organic cherries were cheaper than non organic sale priced cherries, but we ate some and took some to our hosts for Shabbos, so we didn’t end up canning more than 12 pounds.  We were recently enjoying the cherries I canned last summer and now’s a perfect time to replenish the pantry so we can continue to enjoy cherries when fresh prices aren’t at the seasonal low we’re enjoying right now.  Dh has been having them fairly regularly for breakfast, and I figured we must be just about finished with the cherries I canned last summer. 

Today I was planning my next bulk order and in order to buy what I needed most, did an inventory of what I have on hand.  Usually I send the kids to the basement to bring up whatever I need, which is why I don’t have a good idea from seeing it regularly myself.   Imagine my surprise that we still have 14 quarts of canned cherries (plus one 1/2 pint)!  I don’t mind, it’s just that I would have expected that we finished them off!  I also noticed we still have eight + quarts of the pears we picked for free last year.  That’s especially nice since we’ve been keeping an eye on the same neighbor’s pear trees and there’s no sign of any fruit this year.  It just illustrates that you can’t assume what you have one year is what you will have another, and there’s a value in setting aside or preserving during the abundant times so it will tide you over during the lean times!

Avivah