Dia Duit my friends! I'm on a roll today ;o)
First let me repeat my previous post...DO NOT waste your money on a cheap dehydrator. The money you spend on Excalibur will be well worth it!
How do I save money with Excalibur?
Well...in several ways. The biggest way is by buying things on sale and then dehydrating them for long term storage. We have a chest freezer...but there's only so much that can be fit in there. I'm also always worried about losing electricity and losing all of my food to spoilage. Another consideration is the cost of electricity and the possibility that we may not always have the current supply that we do now. Already places in the US have rolling blackouts and brownouts. As the worlds population increases along with our love of all things that suck up power it only stands to reason that rates will go up as demand goes up. Personally we have seen our budgeted monthly bill more than double in the 4 years we have lived here. Our usage has only gone up a very little bit...it's just been rate increase after rate increase, after rate increase...up to three of them in ONE year!
So how does this practically look for me?
First of all frozen veggies are cheaper than canned veggies when you work out how much actual vegetable you get. Cans are full of liquid. Even if a can of peas was 88 cent...the same bag of frozen peas for 88 cent would give me almost twice as much. So just knowing what to buy helps me save money. I love canned veggies, I'm the queen of last minute planning...but I pay for the ease of being able to pop it open and have it ready.
So Krogers frozen veggies are usually $1.39-$1.69 depending on what it is. That is for a 12 oz bag. I won't go into my tirade of them putting 12 oz in instead of the 16oz it used to be ;o) No sense fussing what I can not change. Several times a year Kroger puts their frozen veggies on sale for 88 cent a bag. That is an automatic savings of up to 81 cent a bag.
If I were a "normal" person I may buy at the most 5 bags...saving just over $4 and that's it. But I'm not normal ;o) The last time they were on sale I bought 60 bags of veggies! For a savings of...drum roll please...$48.60!!! Now we're talking!! But what on earth am I going to do with all those bags of veggies? I'm going to dehydrate them!!
The Excalibur has 9 shelves in it. I can usually get at least TEN bags of veggies in there at a time. So I only need to temporarily store 50 bags, and I do that in the chest freezer. I immediately start dehydrating things. There is nothing special you have to do...just slice the bag open, poor on the screen, spread them out in an even layer, and call it done! The only vegetable that I have found to be a bit of a pain is french style cut greenbeans...they just get so thin that they'll slide thru the screens and I lose alot of its and bits. Regular and Italian cut greenbeans work great though.
Some things that are very small to begin with get much smaller with dehydrating. I buy alot of the frozen diced onions and green peppers because they make my life easier...I would put down a gallon ziploc bag...tape down the edges with duct tape...and then dry those on the bag so that I don't lose them all when they shrink.
When the veggies are done drying I store them in recycled spaghetti sauce jars, pickle jars, apple sauce jars...if it's a glass jar with a lid I reuse it :o) Later when I have a bigger stash I'll vacuum seal more...but that will be another post.
Another way to save with Dehydrating is on fresh produce.
This week organic celery was $1 a bunch. I wish I had had more extra in my budget...I would have bought them out, but as it was I bought 6 bunches. If you were to buy that much celery and store it in your fridge it would go bad before you ate it....Not so with Dehydrating! :-D I come home and get the meat slicer down, slice up the celery in a matter of minutes...put it in Excalibur...and now I have dehydrated celery for all my cooking...already sliced and ready to go :-D How easy is that??? Oh, by the way...I saved $16.14 with just that.
Buy things when they are in season and dehydrate them so you have them once the season is over and the prices have doubled again.
Another great savings is by not wasting leftovers.
I made cabbage rolls not long ago...but I only needed the nice big outside leaves. Normally the rest of that cabbage would have gone to waste. Not anymore :-D I sliced it up on that wonderful meat slicer...blanched it for one minute...and dehydrated the rest. It is now waiting in my pantry in a ziploc bag for a soup or stew this fall when I will be able to throw it in for added goodness.
By dehydrating I can grab exactly what I need...and not more. Sometimes I don't need a whole bag of corn...now I can just grab a half cup of dehydrated corn and there's no worries and no waste.
There are many other ways to save with Dehydrating...I couldn't possibly exhaust them all here. But this gives you a start and are my biggest savers right now. I'll be back with more another day :-D
Dia Duit my friends!
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