We Like Making Our Own Stuff

Potato and Cheese Crusted Perch served with wild rice and acorn squash. If you are a regular reader of my blog, you will recall a post I put out in May 2012 titled, Dehydrating Potatoes .  In this post, I explained how I dehydrate potato slices and granules, and also alluded to future posts featuring recipes using the dehydrated potatoes.  Well, it has been about five months since that post, so maybe I should actually post a recipe for you, right!?  Sorry I'm such a slacker. This recipe for perch features the dehydrated potato granules.  If you haven't actually dehydrated any, you can either give it a go by following the instructions on Dehydrating Potatoes , or you can buy some granules at the grocery store.  Dehydrated foods are an excellent addition to the pantry and store well. I used perch as my fish of choice in the following recipe, but other freshwater game fish will work just as well, such as walleye or crappie.  I bet even your run of th...

To me, pickles taste like summer--a time when the cucumbers in our garden are going crazy, and we are harvesting them by the dozen.  They're great on grilled hamburgers, sandwiches, and on relish trays and family barbecues. There are so many different recipes out there for pickles of all kinds, but I'd have to say my favorite type of pickles are sweet pickles.  I knew that I'd be making them this year, because I've been craving them badly (pregnant women really do like pickles), but I had yet to find a recipe that I liked (translation:  an easy recipe). Often times, when I am stumped on a recipe, I turn to an unusual cookbook: As you can see, this cookbook has seen better days!  The cover is gone, the pages are tattered, the binding is coming off...but still, I love this cookbook.  It is a compilation of recipes put together by a local church.  Honestly, I don't remember how I ended up with it--I don't go to this church, nor do I know anyo...

Sometimes, you run across a deal that you just can't pass up: If potatoes go on sale, stock up and dehydrate them. We were grocery shopping one Sunday, and needed to pick up potatoes, which are normally around $2.50 for a 10 pound bag...but then I spied this 25 pound box of potatoes for $2.99, reduced for quick sale.  I'm not sure why they needed to sell them quickly, but we snatched them up! And then we had 25 pounds of potatoes.  That's a lot of taters.

Whether you grow your own beans, or would just like to save money by buying dried beans, freezing cooked beans, legumes, and lentils is a great idea.  It is as convenient as having a can of beans in your pantry, only less expensive !  It's a bit more work to prepare, but the savings are worth it in my opinion. When I grow my own beans, such as black beans, I will allow the beans to stay on the plants in their pods until the pods have turned yellow and crumble easily.  I have learned the hard way not to wait too long to harvest the beans--if you leave them on the plant for too long, the pods will split open, and your precious beans will be on the ground.  Great if you want them to self-seed, but not so awesome if you were planning on storing them for food use! These black beans have a ways to go before they are ready to harvest . Purchasing Dried Beans If you are not growing your own beans, you can purchase dried beans from many sour...

If you are a hunter, or have hunters in the family, you may want to try making some venison jerky.  This is a simple and tasty way to preserve meat, and venison is an excellent choice for making jerky since it is low in fat, allowing for better dehydration.  All you will need to do is slice your meat, marinade, and then dehydrate. There are two important things you will want to do to be able to easily slice your venison thinly.  The first is sharpening your knife.  A sharp knife makes cutting meat so much easier!  Then second is to freeze your meat for about an hour or so before you cut it.  It will be partially frozen, which makes the slicing much easier since the meat wont be squishing around. Once your meat is sliced, it's pretty smooth sailing after that.  Just marinade it and then dehydrate it.  For this recipe, I used my Nesco dehydrator .  However, there are other methods of dehydration , such as using an oven or the power of the ...