My parents gave me a food dehydrator for my birthday, which I have been making good use of, despite receiving it in winter, the off season of gardening. In December, I dried several batches of Golden Delicious apples from a neighbor's tree; the son has now polished these off, but this coming autumn I plan on doing as many as possible starting from August--those really were end of season apples (it was December, after all).
Also in December I took advantage of the Christmas week supermarket sales and bought several kilos of carrots on the cheap, most of which I dehydrated. I recently tried some out, simply rehydrated and cooked, and they were perfectly good.
Since then I've been drying the odd batch of celery including leaves. We've eaten more than half the crop, but by now the plants are starting to think about going to seed, so I've been picking more than I need and drying the extras. I air dried some celery leaves last spring (on trays on top of my fridge) which were useful in the summer when there was no celery. The dehyrated ones are much crispier and brighter green, though I haven't tried cooking with them yet.
Next on the agenda is the multitude of last year's chard now in regrowth. I dried lots of chard last spring and used it over winter crumbled into stews, casseroles, curries, etc. It's been good to have that little bit of garden veg when the ground was too frozen to pick anything else this winter.
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