Dehydrated Goodness

First off, I want to say thank you to all of you for your sweet comments on my last post. It's so nice to reminisce on weddings every now and again!

I've used my dehydrator 3 times now! The first time I already wrote about. Next, I made zucchini chips. Although they're a little bitter (I've never been a huge zucchini fan), they're so tasty and easy to snack. This only a fraction of what I originally made, since more disappear every time we walk into the kitchen. What a way to add veggies -- another thing I'm bad about!

The small jar with the black lid is celery. With student teaching this semester, I'm planning a bunch of homemade soup mixes to be ready in the cabinet for when I walk in from school. This is five stalks of celery; most of my recipes call for one, so this should make about 5 mixes. I was **shocked** at how much the celery shrank. I guess it really is mostly water after all.

The red-lid is 6 green peppers. Organizing Mommy -- I'm glad you laughed about wasting 1/2 a pepper. I realize it's not a big deal, I laugh at myself all the time, but it makes me feel better this way that I won't be wasting. Does this make me frugal or a fanatic? (LOL)

Finally, carrots. I love carrots in all shapes and forms. These will be chopped a little smaller to go into the same soup mixes as the celery. I love being able to make my own convenience food.

Oh, and as an aside, the cake in the back is our anniversary cake. Funny story. When we got home from the wedding, we found a cake about the same size as the one shown here. Somehow, with the exhaustion of moving and marriage, it didn't even sink in that that was the top layer we were supposed to freeze for a year! We ate the whole thing in a week. I didn't realize what we had done until, oh, 2 days before our anniversary. My mom found humor in our situation and didn't want us to be cakeless, so she took the original photographs and re-made us a top layer. French vanilla cake with nutella (hazelnut) spread in between the layers. And, if I may brag on my mom a tiny bit, her version actually looked much prettier and more like what we wanted than the baker's. I'm so proud of her and her cake baking hobby.

My husband's preoccupied with martial arts belt testing all weekend, so I intend on writing several more posts between now and Sunday. One may even be intelligent!