I'm feeling rather parched...

Well, dehydrated that is. Mike's Grandma generously gave us a food dehydrator in fabulous condition and we've been eager to try it out. We had access to some delicious Gravenstein apples from a friend's backyard and being as I've been pumped up from my previous day of freezing corn and canning peaches I thought I'd give the dehydrator a go tonight. Four years ago as a wedding present we had received a beautiful, bright red Williams-Sonoma apple peeler/corer/slicer which tonight took on a fortuitous gleam (having been only allowed to peel, core and slice two apples in it's lifetime). I thrilled to be able to crank the handle and watch in a few seconds what would have otherwise taken me literally several minutes to do. Mike joined me and I found myself quickly demoted to placing apple rings on the tray while he mastered the art of peeling/coring/slicing (while stating, "Just one more..."). We plugged it into the garage since I expected the dehydrator to be an extremely loud, noisy thing (as childhood experience relates) but it ended up being so quiet I could hardly even tell it was on! Definitely unlike what I remember, which was so loud it was turned off at night so we could sleep and restarted in the morning! Mike and I are eager to see how our first batch turns out and then branch out to try other things- I remember dried pears and fruit leather being my favorites!! Since our sweet girl is allergic to all things citrus including citric acid, I pretreated the apples in salt water so hopefully they won't turn terribly brown. As long as they taste good I'll be satisfied!!

Happy to be out of its box and getting use

We were able to fill every tray!

A picture of my peaches we canned yesterday!