One of our kind neighbors left a big bag of apricots on our back porch and we’ve been eating them as fast as we can. Lots of folks along the Front Range have harvested apricots this year and they are so sweet! If you have more apricots than you can eat, consider drying them. I love to dry produce, generally just tomatoes, but this year I plan to expand my inventory to include apricots and zucchini (A-Z!)
Drying food is easy and doesn’t take much time or energy. I don’t have a big freezer and canning in the heat of summer isn’t all that much fun, so drying is my solution to preserving food. I have a dehydrator that is about 10 years old and it is still fast and efficient. Running it for twelve hours only costs about 50 cents.
I washed some of the fruit and put it on a towel to air dry:
You can dry small fruit whole, but I decided to cut these in half and take out the pit. They’ll dry in about 12 hours that way.
I had enough apricots to use two trays. I could’ve put them closer together, but this way they’ll dry faster. Yesterday I saw my first zucchini in the garden, and while I’m sure the first ones will be eaten as soon as they’re a few inches long, pretty soon the plants will out produce my ability to keep up with them. If you’re like me, you hate paying $2 a pound for zucchini in the winter. This year I’ll try drying them to use later in pasta dishes or soup. For those of you with bigger freezers, I’ve read that if you grate them and put them in a ziplock bag, you can freeze them successfully. I once tried freezing zucchini slices, and that was a big disappointing bag of mush when I defrosted it. I think dehydrated squash slices will be perfect for wintertime vegetable soup.
I hope all of you are starting to harvest some of the fruits (or veggies) of your labor.
