— Melissa Bryant

I love using a dehydrator and I use it all the time. In fact, we just had Apple season finish here in Wisconsin, um, and, uh, all of our neighbors and our, we have our, a very small apple tree that only produced one apple this year. Uh, 'cause it's only, its second year in, but all of our neighbors have apple trees as well. And, um, they invite my kids over to go pick as many apples as they can possibly get. So what do you do with so many apples that you can't carry them? Um, we dehydrate them, we dehydrate them down into, I basically, uh, peel them and then slice 'em, um, and then put them a dehydrator. Uh, and I have jars and jars full of dehydrated apples now that my kids love to have. It's a snack, it's a wonderful thing, um, that I put in their lunches. They might have it after school when they come home at the same time and the same, um, vein. I also do mushrooms and dehydrator to be able to dehydrate the mushrooms so I can use them in soups and other things in the winter time or, uh, rehydrate them to be able to use 'em in other dishes. At the same time too, I also love to make things like kale chips in the dehydrator too. So, um, I'll basically make like a cashew kind of cream or a bechamel or something and maybe add other seasonings to it and then coat kale in that and tear it up into bite-sized pieces and put it into the dehydrator to again have as a nice kind of, uh, healthy snack. Um, other things I've done in the past are like, you know, like kinda sheets of like, um, you know, flax and red pepper kind of crisps. You can do like a Parmesan crisp doing, um, you know, like a pinup Parmesan at the same time too. So, uh, yeah, most of the time I'm using my dehydrator to be able to, um, you know, store, uh, fruits and vegetables that um, you know, won't make it through the winter basically. But I might do some other kinda specialty, the specialty things like the crisps or, you know, raw taco shells and stuff like that. I used to do a lot of raw cooking, uh, when I worked with uh, Chad Sarno, uh, a long time ago. Um, and we did a lot of dehydration stuff then. Um, nowadays they use it more as food preservation though. Alright, our next one's from Robert. Oh, uh, I think we already did that one on the, the, yeah, the map of cooking.