Getting the most from your Market purchases: Drying Fruit

Looking for a delicious, healthy way to get the most from your summer fruits? How about drying some? Dried fruit is an easy snack on its own, delicious with yogurt, a wonderful addition to your morning granola...

It's easy to make your own! There are a lot of recipes that suggest drying outdoors, but with our perennially humid climate, drying indoors is safer. This super simple recipe comes from eHow Food:

Things You'll Need:
Your choice of fruit, which can include apricots, apples, peaches, or berries.
Parchment Paper
Cooking Sheet
Large pot

How to Oven Dry Fruit
1. Preheat your oven to 145 degrees.

2. Use fully ripe fruit that is blemish-free.

3. Thoroughly wash, pit, and slice the fruit. The smaller the pieces the quicker it will take for the to dry. However, the fruit should be uniformly sliced so they dry evenly.

4. Blanch or dip the fruit. Blanching works best for apricots and apples. Pectin dips work well with peaches, berries, and cherries. Honey dips can be used for bananas, peaches, and pineapples. Juice dips are preferred for peaches, apples, and bananas.

5. Cover a cooking sheet with parchment paper and place the fruit on top making sure that no slices touch each other.

6. Close the oven door but prop it open with with a wooden spoon so steam is allowed to escape.

7. Keep the fruit in the oven for 4 to 12 hours. After 4 hours you can test a slice and see if it is dry but flexible when cooled. Continue to test until you're satisfied with results.

8. Place the dried fruit in a large open pot in a warm, dry, and airy room. Stir the fruit one to two times a day for 10 to 14 days.

We hope you'll try this out...and share some with your friends!

Get the most from your food dollars: Save that produce!

Do you still have a few remaining strawberries from last Saturday's Market? A last summer squash that's not looking so fresh anymore? Renowned chef Marcus Samuellson has some great hints for saving your fruits and vegetables (and making the most of your Market purchases) over on his blog.

A quick hint for leftover bread? Cube and freeze it -- you can quickly toast the cubes for a salad topping, shave them for bread crumbs, or (my personal favorite) use a combination of leftover breads for delicious bread pudding.

What Did YOU Cook?

We're asking our Market friends to share ideas about how they use the produce and other wonderful things that they find at the Market. We hope this new feature gets your creative juices flowing, too!

First up, Tammie Nelson's dinner party (with a big assist from daughter Kimberly!)

I had a dinner party tonight and everything except for the salmon was from the Cheverly Community Market. Raw veggies, so good that (a) they did not need a dip; and (b) the kids all loved them. Thinly sliced kohlrabi, baby carrots, sliced green peppers, scored/seeded/sliced cucumbers, thinly sliced red beets, shell peas. Fried green tomatoes: thinly sliced green tomatoes, dredged in egg and bread crumbs, two dashes of Crystal's hot sauce each, seasoned with salt and pepper, fried in a very thin layer of very hot oil. Flip them with a fork not a spatula. Serve hot. Chilled curried zucchini buttermilk soup: from Jane Brody's Good Food Book (couldn't find on the web and too tired to type it in; main ingredients are spring onions and zuchinni) Sweet and sour cabbage: I followed this recipe except that I served it at room temperature and used soy bacos instead of bacon. It went really well with the salmon. Fresh bread from the Market Grilled salmon, marinated in soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic. coated with sesame seeds, grilled in tin foil. (This was the only non-Market purchase!)

Sounds like a fantastic dinner, Tammie and Kimberly! Thanks for sharing with us. I understand that Tammie enjoyed the leftovers for lunch the next day, too, an excellent way to get the most out of your shopping/cooking dollars and time.

Have a great meal or recipe idea that you'd like to share? Tell us how you get the most out of your Market purchases!

Stretching Your Market Dollar -- Canning & Preserving

We're all impacted by the rocky economy, and we know that you're trying to make the most out of every dollar you spend on food. We're reexamining techniques that our parents and grandparents used to get the best food for their families and learning all sorts of ways to do more with less.

Canning and preserving always seemed difficult and involved to me, until I tried it last summer (fresh marinara, peach pickles) and it really isn't that hard. The best part? Opening those jars on a snowy late winter day and reliving warm summer mornings at the Market. This summer, I plan to try lots of new (old) ways to get the benefits of summer's plentiful produce long into the fall and winter.

The National Center for Home Food Preservation has great advice and instructions on canning and preserving fresh vegetables, fruits and more. There's also great information on dehydrating foods on pickyourown.org. A quick google search will give you loads of food for thought.

The Market will be chock-full of great things to preserve this Saturday. Make sure to bring your berry baskets and some extra bags -- you'll want to stock up on the perfect ingredients for preserving the tastes of summer!

Keep Local!