Dry, Dry Again

This week I've been doing some dehydrating, which is something I plan to do more of this year than I did last year. Dehydrating fruits and veggies is a great way to preserve them and I'm excited to try drying more veggies this year (I mainly did fruits last year). I bought the book Making and Using Dried Foods this past winter and have learned a lot - I'd highly recommend anyone interested in drying any fruits or veggies to pick up a copy of this book. So anyway, back to my dehydrating. I ran two quarts of sliced strawberries through the dehydrator on Sunday and ran that large bag of organic spinach that I picked up at the farmer's market through last night while we were sleeping. I've got four trays of oregano that are in the dehydrator today and I plan to do a batch of sage tonight. I'll be going to the Allen Street farmers market in Lansing today after work to hopefully pick up some more strawberries, which I plan to use to make strawberry jam and then dehydrate another couple of quarts. Maybe I'll be lucky and find some more spinach, too, otherwise I'll have to wait till the fall crop of spinach to dehydrate more of that. The dehydrated strawberries will be great to bake with - I used home-dried strawberries in the double berry scones I made a few weeks back, just as an example. The dehydrated spinach I plan to use to make homemade spinach pasta this fall/winter and it will also be a good addition to soups. Much more convenient that thawing some spinach for things like that, at least.