Your weekly assignment is B4-3. Did you do your nonfood inventory last week? If not, now is a great time.  

My dehydrator has been running nearly nonstop for a couple weeks now, with a couple of batches of canning interspersed.  I much prefer dehydrating whenever it's an option.  (But I will bottle a whole number of other things-- meat for quick meals, jam/jelly, juices, syrups, ghee, peaches, ...)  Peaches are better canned, but apricots?  They must be an acquired taste-- I acquired it years ago, but my kids haven't.  So we bottle peaches, and dry apricots.  Mostly we turn the apricots into fruit leather.  With the bumper crop we've had this year on our THREE mature apricot trees, that's a whole lot of leather, despite our best efforts to give away as many apricots as possible.  

But that's not all the dehydrator has been used for these last weeks. Dried cherry tomatoes are practically candy... but we've kept up on eating them fresh, with some sharing, so I haven't dried any yet this year.  What I have done is the full 12+ trays loaded with sliced yellow summer squash. It doesn't matter which one.  This year it's a combination of yellow zucchini, yellow straightneck squash, and pattypan squash that got just a little too big.

What do I do with summer squash powder?  Everything I do with the shredded or pureed fresh ones, plus some extras.  Zucchini bread. Zucchini brownies.  Smoothies. Chili, where it's great to help thicken it-- especially if I'm also using tomato powder and onion powder! Soups, where using a little becomes invisible and without any telltale flavor.  Added to regular wheat bread dough. Or muffins. Or pancakes.  

Tomato powder is even better.  I use it in place of tomato sauce, tomato paste, tomato juice, diced tomatoes. Here is a chart that tells you how much tomato powder to use in place of each of those. Tonight I added a bunch to a batch of too-runny salsa. It makes a wonderful base for marinara sauce or pizza sauce, and is used in making my own taco seasoning.  And when added to bread dough along with spices, it makes the bread taste like pizza. 

Pumpkin powder is also great.  It makes pumpkin pie, pumpkin shake, pumpkin roll... anything that you'd use pureed pumpkin in.  And again, I throw it in soup and chili to thicken them and add nutrition, and add to bread to help it stay moist longer.

I once made banana powder out of commercially-dried bananas; a neighbor had bought a 5-lb bag, found that nobody at home would eat them, and brought them to me to see if I could find a use for them.  (The powder was good in banana muffins, banana bread, and smoothies.)

​I've also made mushroom powder, carrot powder, beet powder, and dried crumbled greens. (The greens were a freebie in my yard, an edible weed known as 'redroot pigweed'. A very nutritious member of the amaranth family.) Mushroom powder adds a savory, almost meaty flavor to soups and sauces.  (I made the mushroom powder by starting with a big bag of dried mushrooms found at a Asian market.  If you're local, the place is Ocean Mart in Sandy.) The beet powder is the perfect thing to make from beets that got too big and tough for good eating.  And my favorite use for it is as a natural food color-- though it is also good in smoothies and recovery drinks. (Read what I have on beet powder, near the end of this post.)

All of these powders are made pretty much the same way.  You clean the vegetable,  (Pumpkin is steamed first. The others are handled raw.) slice it an even thickness (1/4- 3/8" is ideal), and dry until crispy.  Add them to a blender or food processor, and run until powdery.  Store airtight; even better if you can remove oxygen and seal the jar or other container.

Are you intrigued?  You can read more about each other these here, along with some recipes and tips:

Zucchini

Summer squash (Ok, zucchini is also a summer squash)

Tomato

Pumpkin

​What will you try?