Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Dehydrating food with free solar energy

If you come up with too much food, whether it's cooked or fresh, fruit or vegetable, the chances are that you can dehydrate it for future use. If you have a vehicle, place food (check to see if it needs pretreatment first) on trays or food safe screens (screens with cloth placed over them are fine) and set them inside a vehicle parked in the sun. Open a couple of windows an inch or so. Or set trays directly in the sun and cover them with loosely woven cloth to keep insects off of them. Sun drying takes a little longer, but it's a lot cheaper (as in free)!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You wouldn't be a reader of the early Mother Earth News magazine would you? I love your ideas but have seen/read most of them in the early 70s & 80s MEN Mags. Of course, reading them that long ago means I don't really remember them until you remind me! Oh the joys of aging. Bellen

Pat said...

I have read and do read MEN occasionally, but they didn't invent those ideas; many of them are common knowledge to the old folks.

Beth said...

That is such a good idea! Why haven't I ever thought of doing that in the car?
When I was a little girl, we took a trip to the west (Arizona and New Mexico) and we "cooked" poptarts in the windows of our car as we drove along! That was about the only good thing I can remember about that HOT August sitting between my big sister and big brother with my feet on the "hump" with NO AIR CONDITIONING!!
Oh yeah, THOSE were the days!!