We have 2 fresh apples and 4 fresh pears left of our fresh fruit harvest from this season's trees. But that doesn't mean that we're out of homegrown fruit.
I still have oodles of apple and crabapple sauce, and lots of apple chunks (from bruised apples) and Asian pear chunks (from our neighbor's fallen tree branches). I also have home-dried prunes, home-dried apple slices (from early apples that were softening), home-dried Asian pear slices, and homemade fruit leather rolls.
The applesauce and crabapple sauce are great to have on hand. However, for those who go off to work during the day, they make terrible portable food, lacking watertight food containers. We do buy some fresh fruit this time of year, tangerines, oranges, bananas, and some apples. As a supplement to those purchases, it's time to start using the dried fruit I made this summer.
This week I brought out some of the fruit leather rolls (I made 120 total). I also made little bags of dried fruit. Each of these bags has the equivalent of half an apple and 5 small plums, about a serving of fruit at lunch.
When we run out of the fruit rolls, I will make more batches, using the frozen apple and crabapple sauces.
By processing a lot of our tree fruit into dried slices/halves or into leather, I ensure that we will have garden fruit when the fresh fruit has been exhausted, stretching our grocery budget during the tough late fall and winter months.
How do you store your dried fruits? They never seem to get quite dry enough, and my husband puts them in the freezer.
ReplyDeleteGreat job making sure you have food for the winter!
Hi Kris,
DeleteI keep all of ours in the freezer, too. I bring out enough for one week at a time and keep those in the fridge.
I have had luck storing dried fruit in a jar in the pantry. My sister vacuum seals hers, but I don't have a vacuum sealer.
DeleteHi Live and Learn,
DeleteA vacuum sealer would be nice to have. The one time I stored home-dried fruit in the pantry it was in a freezer ziplock bag. The fruit got moldy. As Kris mentioned, it can be tricky to make sure you get all of the moisture out without over-drying the fruit. Commercially-dried fruit must follow a strict drying schedule and perhaps use a moisture meter. I suppose I could use a couple of those packets of moisture-absorbing pellets that are food safe. Hmmm, I'll have to look into those. In the meantime, at least in the freezer nothing grows mold.
I bring all my own food to work and my favorite is soup and I use mason jars that are very leakproof to transport my lunch each day. It goes into a lunch bag tucked around my computer and binders all into a backpack that I carry. Pretty safe from leakage. I also take a contigo water bottle (in fact, I carry two, one for coffee and one for water!)
ReplyDeleteAlice
Hi Alice,
DeleteMason jars would be very leakproof and will definitely work for some situations. Thank you for sharing!