Dry Your Own Fruits and Vegetables

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Combine chunks of peeled, cored quince with an equal amount of sugar, and cook with an equal volume of apple pulp to provide a spicy tang. Frozen juice concentrates add a nice tang and color; I particularly like the sour-sweet tang of grapefruit-concentrate/apple leather and the kids find it as zippy as those acid flavored candies sold in stores.

You can make leather from any tart, firm-fleshed fruit, by itself or stretched with apples. Apricots make a wonderful leather. So do plums, pears spiced with ground cloves or another fruit-pie spice, and de-seeded paste-type tomatoes sweetened with brown sugar. Just grind and cook them all till thick.

Store all dried fruit products in an airtight container in a cool, dry place. I store leathers in Ziploc bags with the air sucked out. For use, I keep a revolving supply of leathers in a big old metal cracker tin with a tight lid to keep out moisture and mice. Haven't found a way yet to keep the kids out, but what's better for kids to nibble: home-dried fruit or store-bought Yuckies and Death-Cakes?

Drying Leathers

Cover drying-rack screens with sheets of wax paper that have a two-inch circle torn out of the center. Pat the cooled, partly jelled pulp around the center hole in the paper into a thin, donut-shaped patty. Dry till top is firm. Turn over, peel off the wax paper, and dry till you can handle it. Then, cut into two-inch-wide strips and leave in the dryer till the leather lives up to its  name — thoroughly dry, but still flexible. Strips of fruit leather shaken in a bag with powdered sugar or cornstarch to prevent sticking make a great school snack or anytime treat for the kids and offer quick, natural energy on hikes.

Do you bake carrot or zucchini cake? Try making leathers from well-ground young vegetables (scrubbed but not peeled) and cook till tender with the sweeteners and spices you use in your baked products. Just remember that flavors concentrate on drying, so go easy with the flavorings. Or make tomato leather from firm, high-acid tomatoes and your favorite pizza or spaghetti spices plus a little salt and sugar. Make corn-relish leather from sweet corn cut off the cob and ground with a touch of turmeric and salt. Grind and cook in sweetened, diluted cider vinegar. How about pumpkin-pie leather? Quarter pumpkin or winter squash, pare, remove seeds and strings, and cut the meat into chunks. Mix in sugar and pie spices with enough water to cover and cook to a paste. Dry as any fruit leather. Then, oven-roast the raw seeds in a little oil with a sprinkling of salt for snacking.

The more you practice drying fruits, (and other foods), the more creative concoctions you'll come up with. As Gen MacManniman, the mother of modern home food-drying, put it in the title of her fine little book: "Dry it — You'll like it:"

Vegetables

Dried vegetables aren't all that appetizing eaten out of hand, but once refreshed, they add flavor, texture, and nutrients to winter soups and stews. They also store readily in air-tight containers, and most root crops dry well. Slice thin and then dry rounds of carrots steamed for five minutes, new potatoes steamed for three minutes, or rounds of parsnips, young turnips, kohlrabi, or salsify boiled till crisp-done. Some people dry sweet corn on the cob: dunk for three minutes in boiling water, cool, and cut off the cob before drying. (I find that the corn shrivels to nothing and has little flavor.) It's easiest to leave peas and beans on the vine to mature and dry in the field. Shell, winnow, and store your varicolored soldier and overgrown green/yellow edible pod and shellbeans, green and yellow peas, limas and field beans, and peas in sparkling glass jars and stack on kitchen shelves for a visual as well as tasty treat. But try blanching young green and yellow bean pods briefly in boiling water. When cool, split lengthwise, and dry.

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