I was at the restaurant supply store in town a couple days ago picking up some salt.  I got tired of paying $0.60 per pound for salt when I was certain that it was much cheaper in bulk.  Sure enough it is.  It was under $3.00 for 25 pounds.  It doesn’t ever go bad and is really easy to store in a bucket in the pantry.  I’m guessing the 25 pounds should last me a couple decades.  By now you are wondering what does cheap salt have to do with Cheese Powder.  While picking up the salt I saw a bag of cheese powder really cheap.  I thought, I wonder what that tastes like, and I wonder what I could make with it.  So I picked it up and started experimenting.

The first thing I tried was making a cheese sauce with it.  The directions on the package were for a restaurant and were how to mix the whole bag.  Obviously, a lot more than I would need, or want, at one sitting.  I started with 1/2 cup of water and brought it to a boil.  Once boiling I reduced the heat to minimize evaporation and kept it just under boiling temperature and started slowly adding the cheese powder.  After about 3 1/2 tablespoons of the mixture it was just right.  After cooling it thickened even more so I think the perfect amount is 3 tablespoons of cheese powder to 1/2 cup boiling water.

The girls love tortillas.  So we almost always have some floating around here.  I tried dipping a hunk of tortilla in the sauce and eating it and sure enough it tasted like cheese.  So  I have something cheap that tastes like cheese; is made from cheese (I checked the label – first ingredient it cheese); stores just about forever; and is super easy to prepare.  Wow!  Now I just need some uses for it.

The first is easy.  Make cheese sauce.  This can be used in a variety of dishes.  If you add some jalapeno peppers, it takes a bit of a Mexican flavor and can be used in tacos, enchiladas, and other Mexican dishes.  Plain or creamed up a bit it can be used for adding some zip to vegetables.  Here is the recipe for the cheese sauce:

Cheese Sauce Mix

1/3 cup dehydrated cheese powder
3 Tbsp powdered milk
3 Tbsp dehydrated butter
3 Tbsp flour
1/8 tsp onion powder

Mix these ingredients well. Should yield 1/2 cup of dry mix.
To make the sauce: Mix 1 cup of boiling water to 1/2 cup of dry mix.
Use on vegetables like broccoli, celery, potatoes, or add some southwestern spices and serve over southwestern dishes.

Another sauce type recipe, but much thicker is this dip recipe.

Southwestern Cheese Dip Mix

1 cup sour cream
1/4 cup cheese powder
1/4 cup canned chillies
1 tsp taco seasoning

Mix well.  Use as a dip for corn chips or raw vegetables.

An obvious use for the powder is to make macaroni and cheese very similar to the stuff that comes in the blue box.  I loathe it, but the kids like instant macaroni and cheese for some reason, so we keep boxes around for nights when the wife and I are going out and the kids are on their own for dinner.  I like the idea of being able to make my own, instant, macaroni and cheese but I would end up sprucing it up anyway, so why not just make the real thing?  I would need to use some homemade egg noodles.  Then I would want to add a bit of garlic, and onion.  Cube some left over ham, or possibly open a can of Spam and cube it up.  Finally I’d mix some bread crumbs with some butter and sprinkle on top and bake for about a half hour.  It hardly seems right to dump in a few spoons of cheese powder instead of making a roux from some homemade cheese!  But in case you like the blue box stuff, here is a recipe for it.

Macaroni and Cheese

1¼ cups uncooked macaroni
¼ cup cheese powder
¼ cup milk
¼ cup butter

Cook macaroni in boiling water until tender. Drain. Add cheese powder, milk and butter; stir gently until noodles are well coated.

Finally I present an old backpacking/camping recipe using the cheese powder.  We used to save packets from the blue boxes to make this when we went backpacking, so I’m not certain how much powder comes in one of the pouches, but I’m guessing that it was probably about 3 tablespoons based upon the amount of milk and butter you are supposed to add.  This is a 1 pot meal that is tasty and filling.

Cheesy Chicken Rice Soup

1/2 cup instant rice
3 tbsp cheese powder
1 Tbsp powdered milk
1 Tbsp dried veggie mix
5oz can of chicken
Salt to taste

To this add one cup boiling water and cover.  Let sit 5 to 10 minutes.

Cheese Powder Repackaged and Awaiting a Trip to the Pantry.

There are some simple things to try and do with cheese powder.  I took the large bag that it comes in and divided it up into smaller portions and vacuum sealed them in mason jars.  These should have a relatively long shelf life as long as the fats/oils in the cheese powder don’t go rancid.  Evacuating most of the oxygen from the container using the food savers will help prolong that process.

PS:  The hard drive crashed at the end of last week.  I spent most of last weekend reformatting and reinstalling drivers.  Most of the week was spent restoring files, reinstalling software and reconfiguring the system.  I backup fairly regularly and don’t think I lost anything other than the time for the reinstall.  If you do not regularly back up your system think hard about doing it soon.  You will regret the loss if you haven’t.

4 Pounds of Dehydrated Lemons Ready for the Pantry.

Lemons were on sale really cheap.  I picked up a couple pounds and dehydrated them.  the process for dehydrating a lemon isn’t any different than dehydrating a lime.  If you recall I did a blog entry on limes a few weeks ago and you can read about it here. Basically the process is to clean the lemon, slice it thinly and uniformly, and then place it on the dehydrator tray until brittle and it will snap.  These took about 12 hours to dry on a fairly low setting.  I try to use a low setting to avoid cooking the food and boiling off any of the essential oils in the food.  I’m particularly concerned when I dry lemons because I want to maintain as much of the lemon oil in the pieces as I can.

Today’s post isn’t really about the dehydrating process for the limes but more about the using them.  There is a product on the market called True Lemon you can read all about it at www.truelemon.com.  In fact you can get a free sample of the product here.  I just tried signing up for a free sample, but I obviously havent received it so I don’t know how long it will take them to send it out.

Regardless I love lemons in a lot of things but especially in my tea.  I couldn’t help but think that drying some lemons for use in the tea has got to be a lot better for me, the environment, and the wallet than buying these little foil packets of crystallized lemon from the True-Lemon people.  Please permit me to elaborate…The label for the True-Lemon says it contains maltodextrin.  I know that maltodextrin is derived from corn, but ya’ know…I just want some lemon.  The packaging, the foil packets, the freight involved in trucking the lemons from God knows where to the True-Lemon plant, the freight involved in trucking them to my local store, the waste at the True-Lemon facility, etc…If I dry my lemons I use it all either in the dehydrator or in the compost bin for my worms.  I use as local as I can get lemons for a guy in Michigan.  And finally 4 pounds of lemons was a dollar.  The packets which will last me about 1/3 as long as these lemons are about 3.00.  Don’t get me wrong.  I think the True-Lemon stuff is a great tasting convenient product.  If you aren’t excited about eating local or drying your own food, please use it.  I’ve just decided that I want to make my own storable lemon product instead of buying someone else’s from now on.

Tea and a Dehydrated Lemon Slice

To use my dehydrated lemon for a cup of tea it’s pretty easy.  Boil up some water.  Drop a slice of dehydrated lemon into the cup.  Add the boiling water and brew as usual.  Enjoy the tea!  The lemon will rehydrate and add lemon flavor to the tea in the process of rehydrating.  When you are done drinking the tea, you can make a second cup and still get a surprising amount of lemon flavor out of the slice from the first cup.  When you are done with the second cup, you can eat the rehydrated lemon.  It will be a little mushy.  Then you can toss it into the compost bin for the worms.

Mug O Tea with Lemon!

I’m probably violating some tea purists rule by putting lemon in my tea, but it’s how I enjoy it!

Cheers!

The big four ways of storing food are root cellaring, canning, freezing, and dehydrating.  They each have their place in your aresanal of skill sets.  Just because an item cans well or was meant to be stored in the root cellar is no reason to abandon one of the other methods.  Canning is a good way to store a lot of vegetables, but should you need to make your storage portable and light weight it is about one of the worst.  Simply put there is a time and a place for each of the many ways of storing food.  Practice your skills at all of them and you won’t come up short when you really need them.

Dehydrating foods is a simple and economical way of storing food for the future.  You could have a surplus of food because you harvested a bumper crop.  You could have a whole lot of something else because a kind neighbor gifted you 23 zucchini.  Or you might have a whole lot of frozen shredded potatoes because they were on sale and you knew you were going to eventually use them anyway and now they are taking up way too much room in your freezer.  Well that is exactly where I found myself this morning.  So I decided to dehydrate them.

Frozen Shreaded Potatoes On Sale

The great thing about dehydrating store frozen potatoes is that they are already to dehydrate.  The company that packaged them for freezing already steam blanched them before they flash froze them and packaged them up in neat little two pound bags.  All you have to do is spread them out on your dehydrator tray and plug it in.  Depending upon how much you load up the dehydrator you will soon have a bounty of light weight dehydrated potatoes.

Three Trays of Potatoes from a Two pound Bag

I have one of the round Nesco Dehydrators with 12 trays.  I can get 2/3 of a pound of potatoes on to one of the trays.  With a full load 8 pounds of potatoes, it usually will take me about 8 hours to thoroughly dry them in the winter.  You know the potatoes are ready when the pieces are brittle and snap like dry twigs.  If you have ever used the boxed dehydrated potatoes from Betty Crocker you will know what these should look like when done dehydrating.

Once they are dry, I will package them up in mason jars, drop an oxygen absorber into the jar, and then evacuate the air from the jar using my vacuum sealer with a special attachment.  The dehydrating, oxygen absorber, and vacuum sealer give these about an infinite shelf life.  If portability is one of your big needs, you could vacuum seal the dehydrated potatoes in a food saver bag.  I have had some slight problems with this because the sharp edges of the dry potatoes tend to tear the plastic and a good seal will not form.

When it comes time to use the potatoes I will put a tbsp of oil in a pan along with a cup of water and bring it to a boil.  I then will add a tsp of salt and a cup of the dry potatoes and cover.  With some occasional stirring you will obtain some of the most excellent, non-greasy hash browns you have ever had.

NFL playoffs and the Superbowl bring a pleasant memory to the front of my mind every year; fresh citrus fruits from Florida.  When I was a child my parents would often purchase a large case of oranges and grapefruit from a guy who would drive a truck to Florida and bring them back for everyone.  Now many years later, I look forward to winter as a chance to eat the freshest of the citrus.

Two Pounds of Limes Ready to Preserve

It’s hard to get local citrus here in Michigan.  I do have a few dwarf lemon, lime, and orange trees that are potted that I bring in and out as the weather turns cold.  Last year was my first year with them and I even harvested three whole limes from one of the trees.  I’m excited about the prospect of getting them into a hot house and seeing how much I can get them to produce.  Until them I think that I need to consider US grown citrus as the closest thing to local food I can do in my goal to eat more local foods.  Fortunately I have several tools at my disposal to extend the harvest into other seasons.  Canning, dehydrating, juicing, and fermenting are the the most applicable to the citrus fruits.  Freezing and cellaring are not too successful for the citrus fruits.  While I enjoy canned grapefruit, orange juice, and a bit of lemon strawberry wine, I really enjoy the simplicity and functionality of dehydrated citrus.

Slice the Limes 1/4" to 1/8" Thick.

Dehydrating limes is particularly easy; it is important to wash and scrub the limes prior to slicing. I use a soft bristled brush and warm water.  After washing I slice the limes into 1/8″ to 1/4″ slices. If there are any seeds present I will usually pluck those out.  Uniformity of slice thickness is more important than the actual slice thickness.  If you have a hard time slicking the limes to 1/4″ you could even dry them up to 1/2″ think it will just take significantly longer to remove the moisture from them.

After slicing, arrange the limes in a single organized layer on your dehydrator trays.

Lime Slices Ready to Dehydrate

I sliced two pounds of limes and set the dehydrator for 135ºF.  I started drying the limes at 10:00 in the morning and at 10:00 at night the limes were crisp, brittle, and ready to store.  I store most of my dehydrated items in mason jars.  I have an attachment for my vacuum sealer that allows me to evacuate most of the air from a jar and prevent oxidation of the contents.  I will also throw in a couple of oxygen absorbing packets to take up any remnants of oxygen the food saver couldn’t quite get out.

Dehydrated Limes in Vacuum Sealed Jars

Drying the limes made the wife and kids much happier than the onions from a couple of weeks ago.  Walking into a garage smelling like limes has a bit more appeal than the onions.  Once you have some dried limes you may be wondering what to do with them.  Here are a few uses for your consideration:

• Add a slice of dried lime to a glass of water for an refreshing touch
• A few slices added to a water bottle makes a thirst quenching drink for hiking, backpacking, or climbing. The dried slices make it easy to carry plenty to last even on long trips
• Breakup one and add it to water that has been boiled or chlorinated to purify it.  The lime will greatly improve the taste.
• Mix honey with water (2:1) and soak a dehydrated slice in the resulting solution for an hour.  Re-Dehydrate.  This will make a candied lime
• Mix with tea during brewing for a nice citrus flavored beverage
• Blend in the blender to pulverize and mix with water for soaking apples and other fruits that brown during dehydration.  Similar to spraying with lemon juice.
• Use the powdered lime as a spice to sprinkle on chicken or fish
• Use the powdered lime to flavor salsa and corn

If you have good soil, onions are one of the simplest things in the world to grow.  Especially if you use sets. My problem with onions is that they are so easy to grow, I tend to not need as many as come ready in the late summer or early fall.  We use them in roasts, stews, salsas, and even raw on burgers, but the simple reality for our family is that while we like the flavor that an onion imparts to food, we aren’t terribly crazy about the texture of a cooked onion unless it has been dipped in batter and deep fried.

To combat our abundance of onions we will often store them in our cellar.  There is a nice cool corner where they will usually last about 2-3 months without getting too mushy or starting to sprout.  Our cellar isn’t as cool or humid as a traditional root cellar so that will have to do.  Unfortunately those two or three months only get us to December and we don’t want to half to wait until the following fall to have our onions.

That is where the dehydrating comes in.  The chore of dehydrating onions is not for the faint of heart.  I have chopped many a single onion in my day and never found the need to reach for a tissue to wipe my watery eyes, but by the time you are on your tenth onion in as many minutes, the tears are streaming down the cheeks and the nose is watering too.

The actual act of dehydrating them is rather simple.

• I remove the ends
• Peel away the outer skin
• Slice the onions as thin as I can
• Separate the rings and lay out on the dehydrator tray
• Dehydrated at 130ºF until they are brittle and snap
• Store in a mason jar

Consider chopping and running your dehydrator outdoors or in your garage.  The smell of that many onions for that long can grow wearisome.  Also be sure to wear plastic gloves.  Your hands will smell like onions for a minimum of 2 days after handling that many onions.

I use the long slices for soups and stews.  If you want smaller pieces it is very easy to crumble the large pieces as you add them to the pot.  If you are after an onion powder, you can place the dehydrated onion in a food processor and chop them up until they are the desired size.  Add some salt if onion salt is what you are looking for.

Onions have a lot of Vitamin C, B6, Chromium, and Iron.  These are maintained at reasonable levels when dried at lower temperatures.  Dehydrated onions are simple to make and almost impossible to mess up.  If you are looking for something easy to start dehydrating with consider onions, they may not be as flashy as jerky, or tasty as sugared apples, but they will get used over and over again as you cook your daily meals.