dehydrating

One of the things we are doing to prepare for our five weeks of village living is dehydrate food.  You have the option to dehydrate fruits, vegetables, or meat.  My roommate and I made up a plan of what we wanted to try and signed up for our days.  If there are some open slots on the schedule we might try to sign up for another day to dehydrate a bit more.

The kitchen buys the food that we have requested and then we clean and soak the fruits and vegetables (in bleach water to get rid of bugs,etc.), slice and dice, blanch if necessary (carrots and green beans especially), lay them out on screen trays, and put them in the converted refrigerators to dry out.  It's quite a process, but so worth it when you have lightweight food that doesn't spoil as easily. 

We decided to try out the following items on our first day:
10 carrots
2 pineapples
1 papaya
2 green peppers
3 bunches of green beans (no idea how else to describe that amount!)

setting out our food and trays

bleach soak

These old refrigerators have been converted to dehydrators.  I don't know all the details, but they put light bulbs in the bottom and drill holes in the sides for ventilation.  You put the food in on screen trays and let it sit for 4-8 hours.

You can see the light bulbs and holes.

Our first dehydrating day was on Saturday and no one else had signed up, so we were able to use both of the fruit and vegetable fridges, which made it a lot easier for so much food!

Most things should be cut smaller than a 1/4 inch thick.  That means a lot of cutting!

We were able to use the gas stove top to blanch the beans and carrots rather than having to make a fire, what a blessing!

After we got all our trays prepared we loaded them into the refrigerators and left them until that afternoon. 

carrots and green peppers

pineapple

The food was in the fridges by 10 or 10:15am and we got the last tray out around 5:30pm.  We spent the time in between that battling with a fire to cook our lunch and supper so by the end of the day we had done a lot of food stuff!

The pineapple made some really fun patterns.

The day's worth of dehydrating.  Doesn't look like much, does it?

Today was our second day of dehydrating.  I was wondering how on earth we were going to find time in our schedule to chop the 10 onions and 12ish bananas, but God gave us the gift of an unexpected free hour after breakfast this morning due to a schedule change. 



I'm pretty sure the onions and bananas might smell like each other since they are dehydrating in the same fridge and both have strong odors, but it's better than not having them . . . I hope. : )

Once we get out to the village, we will be able to use these foods to supplement our meals in case we don't have good access to a local market or want some more variety in our diet.  Not all of these fruits are vegetables are available in the villages, some like the carrots are grown in the highlands and are brought to town to sell at the market there. 

This is really good practice because if I'm assigned to work in a village location I might want to dehydrate some things to take out to the village with me that don't grow in that area.  In some areas of the country, the diet can be very limited based on what is available.  Things such as "kaukau" (a type of sweet potato) are often the staple, but it's nice to have variety!  We learned briefly about how you can dehydrate using the sun, but it is nice to have access, while we are here, to these dehydrators that make the work so much simpler.