[pct-l] Food Dehydrator Tips or Recipes?

[kylie skidmore]

Hey Lisa,

I've been eating home-dehy food all my life while hiking - and you can do
pretty much anything (well... there are limits, but...). you can dehy almost
any meal that's not assembled (like lasagne etc). things like stir fries and
curries that call for strips or chunks of meat dehy (and rehy) way better if
you use mince. with school groups etc i avoid chicken - but our family eats
it and it works great (we also have a lot of roo - but i'm guessing that's
not so easy to come by over there). we use snap lock bags, and with meals i
always double or triple bag because as someone mentioned - the dehy meat can
get quite sharp.

we do curries, dahl, stirfries, pasta sauces, anything and everything,
provided the meat works as a mince (and it often works in dishes you
wouldn't expect). it's worth leaving the oil out, or dramatically reducing
it - stuff dehy's better with no oil. if it's a coconut based curry, it's
worth making it as you would but leaving out the coconut milk and adding it
in powder form, same with satays and peanut butter powder. if you can be
bothered you can do sauce for gnocchi and carry dehy'd potato and flour and
make your gnocchi fresh in the bush. my students like anything like chilli
con carne, bolognese sauce, actually anything really, with potato on top and
then cheese (even though it's usually the disgusting non-perishable kraft
cheddar we have) - like shepherd's or cottage pie.

you can mix yoghurt with fruit (blend it) to make snacks - and we often add
dehy yoghurt and dehy'd fruit to our muesli and let it soak for a little
while. you can do vegies separately to add to meals (or cook them in with
it). if you just blanch them, they come up beautiful and bright when you
rehy them out in the bush. dried mango tastes way way better if you do it at
home - actually pretty much every fruit tastes better home dehy'd.

we tend to carry nalgene bottles (i know - i really don't have any kind of
UL background), and sort of 2ish in the arvo, (depending on when we want
tea), we put the dehy'd meal into the nalgene and cover it with water, whack
it back in our packs and keep walking - so that it's fully rehydrated and
all it needs is heating at tea time. you can eat it completely dehy'd (my
brother in law loves meals dehy'd to eat as a snack - like crumbly jerky
with vegies in it), but it dehydrates you, and i really notice my students
smell way worse if they eat not fully rehydrated meals.

avocado by itself - totally does not work (i know - intuitive really - but
someone assured me it did)... it's great just doing mushrooms and tomatoes
in season, and then having them to add to things - handy and tasty, and so
easy.

and we (this might be dodgey but we've never had a problem), keep meals for
6 months no worries. we snaplock them up and they're fine... i've worked
with people who seal them with those bags that seal - which is great, cept
the bags always seem to get perforations, and are far harder to pour from -
so we always have to snaplock them anyway.

when i'm walking alone i have cous cous with eveything cos it's so easy and
i like it, but my folks actually cook their pasta and dehydrate that too
(separately), which really cuts down on fuel usage - cooks far faster.

skids