Fruit Leather

I'm making a batch of spiced peach leather right now, so I figured I'd better upload the pics I took of my last batch of strawberry leather.


I had never made fruit leather before this summer. Prepackaged fruit leather from the store was such a rare luxury that I didn't indulge much because of the price. Now, while my fifth batch is dehydrating, I can say making it yourself is fun, easy, cheap, and delicious! And you can take pride in your homemade, good-for-you treats.

It's the perfect healthy snack for little ones!


I first got the idea to try making fruit leather from Barefoot Childhood. Though that post got me on the path to making homemade fruit leather, in the end I didn't follow those directions. I chose to boil my fruit before blending it to get the natural sweetness from the fruit, thus eliminating any added sugar. Trust me, they taste plenty sweet without the extra sugar (this coming from the lady who threw away her own birthday cake because it was too sweet!). I also chose to run a dehydrator to dry the fruit out as opposed to baking on low heat in the oven. If you want to add sugar and cook/dry out in the oven, then go ahead and click the link above!


INGREDIENTS

Four apples, two pears, one lemon, and a good dose of flavoring fruit (I've used boxes of strawberries, a bag of cherries, a couple peaches, and half a bag of seedless grapes. All turned out yummy).

Rinse well.


DIRECTIONS

Prepare fruit to be cooked. Peel, core, and chunk apples and pears into small pieces.

Toss apple and pear chunks into a large pot with 1/2 a cup of water (to help get things started) and the juice of half of the lemon. Boil uncovered on medium heat.

Prepare flavoring fruit to be cooked. (Strawberries get sliced, cherries I just ripped in half to get the stones out, peaches get peeled and broken into pieces, and grapes get plucked from the vine and popped between your fingers.)

Toss flavoring fruit into the pot and boil down (still uncovered) about 20 minutes.

When it looks something like this, it's done.

BONUS STEP: While you wait, you can squeeze the other lemon half into a cup, add a couple of spoonfuls of that delicious juice from the pot, and have some rockin' flavored lemonade!

Blend.

BONUS STEP: Feed the baby fresh applesauce.

Pour sauce onto parchment paper cut to fit dehydrator trays, and spread in a thick layer with a spoon. (When I say "cut to fit" I mean Senpai traced the tray with a razor blade.)




Dehydrate overnight.

Check in the morning and then every couple of hours after that. Each tray will be done on its own time, usually the bottom layers dry completely before the top. I remove the empty trays to get the top trays closer to the heating element.


Peel leather away from the parchment paper, tear into strips, and store in a glass container on the counter. No need to refrigerate. I've heard that mold will eventually grow on fruit leather, but I haven't had that problem, I think because the dehydrator does such a good job of removing all liquid. I'd say your batch will last about two weeks, that is, if you don't eat them all first! ;-) We haven't made it past one week. :-P

One last thing: if you haven't guessed by now, this is a very flexible recipe. I've made it without the pears, and I've made it using the juice from the whole lemon. If you're really wondering how much flavoring fruit to add, the answer is, "How much have you got?" It's very hard to go wrong with fruit leather, so play around with the ingredients you have on hand.


Enjoy!

Homemade Spaghetti Sauce

I tried my hand at canning this year. I had never done it myself, though I had watched my Mom make strawberry jam, spiced peach jam (my favorite!), and canned peach slices in the past. Our tomato plants had exploded this year (as they usually do, actually) with more tomatoes than we could use up at once, so I decided to try making homemade spaghetti sauce. I followed the instructions, including the seasoning recipe, found here, omitting the celery and salt.

The first time I tried making tomato sauce earlier in the season, we picked every tomato we could find, including the yellow variety, to try to get the 20 lbs required. I started right when R went to bed at 8 pm, and did not finish until 2 in the morning. I am not impressed with that batch. The texture was watery and stringy because the tomatoes would not boil down, and the 1/4 cup of lemon juice in addition to all of those yellow tomatoes made it taste incredibly tart. I canned it anyway and called it "Zesty Marinara."

I decided to try again. This time, I collected and froze the tomatoes as they ripened in batches. I had heard that freezing and thawing tomatoes was an easy way to remove the skin, and I thought it might cut down on the preparation time. Not at all. I started the process this morning at 9 am, and I'm writing this post as the jars are in the canning bath now at 2 pm. My back hurts from leaning over the sink trying to remove seeds for three hours, and my feet hurt from standing in front of the stove seasoning the sauce for the rest of the time. When I looked at the large pile of unusable skin, seeds, liquid, and other tomato parts, and compared it to the pile of usable tomato flesh that was HALF its size, I told myself, "Never again." This is far too much work. I would rather let tomatoes rot on the vine than try to do this again.

The plus side to today's aches and pains is that this batch can be properly labeled "Spaghetti Sauce." I didn't use a single yellow tomato, I only added two splashes of lemon juice instead of the 1/4 cup the recipe called for, and I blended the sauce to make it a better texture. Freezing and thawing the tomatoes removed far too much liquid, though, and I had to add 3 cups of water back into the sauce. I'm only getting 5 pint jars out of this batch, which is incredibly frustrating since only 4 jars fit in the canning bath at a time. I'll be waiting an extra 35 minutes just for one jar to process, grrr. But at least it tastes good.



My kitchen is a disaster, sigh. Next time I try canning, I think I'll stick with jams.

Food, Real Food!

And suddenly, she's eating table food.



Little Miss R, 9 1/2 months old now, just today decided to sample some of my oatmeal for breakfast, and wanted to try some noodles for lunch. I guess I need to put more effort into choosing healthy foods for lunch now instead of just grabbing whatever's available. Someday R will notice that her ramen noodles aren't smeared in the same yellow, sodium-laden seasoning as mine, and that's when we'll really be in trouble. We'd do better to stay away from the ramen I think. ^_^



Like the rest of the country we had snowfall recently, and this time we were ready for it! The last time it snowed was on Christmas. We didn't have a snowsuit for R then, so this was her first experience going outside and sitting in the fluffy whiteness. She wasn't impressed overall.


We didn't have boots for her, so I put sandwich baggies over her Hello Kitty slippers. Kawaii!!



I finished the crochet project I had been working on. It's a blanket buddy for R. It was going to be a birthday present, but since it's a bunny, I figure it's more Easter appropriate. I've given it to the Easter Bunny for safekeeping.

And on a final note...



Don't they look so adorable??