dehydrated summer

I'm currently having a love affair with my dehydrator. Someone suggested dehydrating strawberries back at the beginning of July, and after trying those, I haven't looked back! 

I like to make berry jams, but I find we don't eat a lot of them, at least not yet. Maybe when my kids can get their mouth around a PBJ sandwich I'll be using more. 

For now, however, I am seriously in love with dehydrated berries. I've sliced strawberries and put them in as-is, but the time I sprinkled some maple sugar over them was the time something inside my mouth exploded. WOW. 

This is my 40 year old dehydrator. Still works!

I've been picking a lot of raspberries in the past week - from Horse Hill Berry Farm as well as the homes of a couple folks from church, and most of them have gone into the dehydrator. (The ones from our garden pretty much make it just as far as our mouths :)

I have a feeling that when the snow flies, we'll all be incredibly grateful for this taste of summer. The raspberries dry so nicely, and except for the obvious lack of liquid, they taste exactly like...a raspberry.

Next experiment: blueberries!

The great thing about dehydrating is that your fruit is preserved at such a low temperature that all the good nutrients are still in it. So it's much better health-wise than canning. Plus, it's way less time consuming! You just throw your fruit on the trays and check on it once it a while. Now that's my kind of food preservation. Now to actually "preserve" this batch until winter...aye, there's the rub.