healthy laps

I got a few fun new toys for Christmas that you will get a glimpse at in the next few weeks!  My first new toy is a dehydrator!  How fun is that?!  I love heathly eating and loved dried fruit, but hate that so much of the dried fruit out there is full of added sugar!!  And, when you find the types that are not full of sugar, they are so much more expensive.

So, on our way home from NY, we stopped at Stew Leonards in Connecticut to pick up some fresh fruit to dehydrate!  We got a pineapple, 2 pears, 5 kiwis, a mango and some bananas.  I could not wait to try my new toy!

It was much easier that I had expected.  Basically, you cut up the fruit (trying to make them the same thickness so that they dehydrate at the same speed), place them in the machine and plug it in!  The manual says that some fruit should be pre-treated (dipped in lemon, or something else acidic, to keep them from turning brown), but I did not pre-treat anything.  I wanted to see how everything worked naturally!

My fruit all cut up and ready to go: pineapple, kiwi, mango, pear and banana.

Then, I placed the fruit on the 4 trays:

There are different settings for fruits, veggies, jerky, etc.  I stacked the trays together and turned this to 135°F for fruit.

The fruit I chose, dried at similar times according to the owner’s manual, but the kiwi’s and mango’s dried a little faster and ended up a little harder.  I set the machine up before bedtime to let it work it’s magic overnight!  10 hours later, I had homemade dried fruit!!

It is delicious!  (And, I had some taste testers make sure I wasn’t being biased!)  This fruit, especially the pineapple, is still sweet and delicious and much better tasting than any store bought dried fruit.

Filed under: Eating Laps, Recipes, Uncategorized | Tagged: dehydrator, dried fruit, Stew Leonards |