My New Fruity Pastime

What's in the box you ask? Well! I was watching a Friends rerun the other evening....it was the one with Chandler and the crazy roommate. The crazy roommate was really into dehydrating foods. I mentioned to Sean that I've always thought it'd be fun to dehydrate fruit. He told me how much he'd like to eat dehydrated fruit. So off to Amazon we went and bought a highly rated, not too expensive dehydrator.

Now the fun part begins! I do not know the first thing about dehydrating. This was bought on a whim. So I opened up the instruction manual and gave myself a quick lesson and then started chopping. Being unprepared means I didn't even have much fruit to dehydrate. But we generally always have apples and bananas on hand so that's what I chopped.

This particular model came with a fruit leather tray (think fruit roll-up). My kids (and myself) love fruit roll-ups so to be able to make my own was definitely a selling feature. One of the recipes for the fruit roll-ups was a pina colada leather that consists of a can of pineapple, a banana and some coconut that you put in a blender then pour out on the tray in the dehydrator. Sure sounded good to me and I had all the ingredients. Score!

The apples required a little prep work before they could go in. First you must chop them super thin. Luckily I bought a mandoline slicer at the same time we got the dehydrator. How have I lived this long without a mandoline?! Those things are awesome! One apple fills two trays. They must be soaked in orange juice or lemon juice for five minutes so they don't turn brown. I sprinkled them with cinnamon after their soaking.

After 8 hours everything was thoroughly dried out. The bananas didn't turn out like I imagined. For some reason I was thinking of those delicious banana chips you buy in the grocery store. Those are actually fried in coconut oil and sprayed with a sugar solution (I had to look it up). These banana chips are more like leather chips, not crispy. Still very good, just not what I had imagined. The apple chips were awesome. Nice and crisp. The pineapple fruit roll-up was good even if my kids didn't like it (have I mentioned how picky they are?).  I just bought a fresh pineapple to dehydrate tomorrow, can't wait! So much to dehydrate out there, I better get truckin'.