In My Colorful Kitchen

While I love canning, some foods don't lend themselves to canning (in my opinion). I find many vegetables lose color and flavor when canned, such as green beans and carrots. And I discovered that dried apples make wonderful pies. (Don't their colors go well with the kitchen towels I wove?) So here we have some lovely apples waiting to be peeled/cored/sliced all at once on my wonderful little handcrank peeler, dropped in some lemon water and dried for winter treats.


And this year I decided to take advantage of a sale on peppers to try my hand at drying some for winter casseroles and stir fries. Sometimes that bit of pepper really makes a dish pop with color and flavor. But when I need some sweet pepper for a dish, they usually cost $3.99 each. So of course, being me, I skip the pepper. When I saw they were 10/$10 this week for red, orange and gold peppers, I bought me up $11 dollars worth to experiment with. I'll let you know how they work out. Here's an interesting pepper. When I split it in half I found a green pepper inside it, nearly filling the cavity.


I've dried carrots in the past with great success. They maintain their color and sweetness and are so easy to add to soups and stews. Carrots are one of those items that become cheaper the more you purchase. And so I bought a 10 pound bag of organic carrots at Costco and am in the process of turning them into dried slices and dices. These need to be blanched and chilled for best results. Otherwise the enzymes will continue to work in them, just at a much slower pace, and color and flavor will deteriorate over time.

So here's my dehydrator filled up with colorful veggies to be enjoyed all winter. I'm sure I'll be busy all week with my apples and carrots. I'm really glad I got the large capacity dryer.



Yes, I really did weave those dishtowels and here's a link to the dressing of the loom for those towels which was my first project on my floor loom. :) Ah, good times and good memories.

http://kksmith.pbworks.com/f/1st+Weaving+Project+narrated.pdf