Celery

As long as the dehydrator was out, and the price for celery wasn't too bad, I picked up three batches of celery to dry (we've been out for a looong time). I cleaned and trimmed the celery, kept out the hearts for some ants-on-a-log, and weighed the remainder. I had 3 pounds. Then I used the food processor with the slicer blade and did 6 stalks of celeery at a time. What quick work that made! I put the celery on the dryer trays 1 layer deep and dehydrated for about 16 hours at 110 degrees. My final yield was 2 ounces of finished product, or 1.5 pounds per ounce.

Cabbage!

Since the summer kitchen isn't ready to go yet, I took the advice from my friends at the Canning2 group and decided to dry most of the cabbage. I kept one head out to make fresh cole slaw, leaving 14.5 pounds to work with. We have an Oster Meat/Food Slicer which I used to shred the cabbage. Then I filled 25 trays on the dehydrator and ran it for about 14 hours at 110 degrees. Once everything was dry I removed the cabbage and weighed it on the kitchen scale, parceling it into 15 plastic zip lock bags of 2 ounce each, or just over the equivalent of 1 pound of product per 2 ounce bag. To finish, I put all 15 bags in a larger sealed container that will go into our canning pantry.