Productive Morning

 It has been a busy and productive morning!

Started with my Thursday morning chat with Soni.

And then I got up and made breakfast.

(Eggs, bacon & okra... yum!)

Then we all adjourned to Rod's computer

in our bedroom and looked at house plans

and narrowed it down to two online

and one Kyle drew up.

Printed those and the guys headed out to the

farm with some sticks and surveyor's tape

to mark it out on the property.

Meanwhile,

I pulled the ice cream, ice cream sandwiches,

and bananas out of the freeze dryer to process.

Set the hair dryer in the FD to start the defrosting...

OOPS!

Should have used parchment paper under the

bananas! It's been awhile since I've done any

of those and they stick really badly.

But I got them all into bags.

We got 12 bags of bananas,

14 bags of ice cream sandwiches,

12 bags of unicorn ice cream,

and then I did another 12 bags of

peaches from some I dried in 2022.

They were a big hit last week at

the market, so I bagged some up and I'll 

bring another big bag in case we sell out.

Then I washed those trays and pulled

the jars of tomato puree out of the fridge.

I was watching one of my YouTube people

the other day and she was doing tomatoes.

(Canning, not freeze drying) 

and she ran her's through a collander to get

some of the seeds out.

DUH!

Look at all that beautiful pulp (and SEEDS)

I dumped it into my fine mesh strainer and

used a soup ladle to scrape it back and forth

and work all the juice and pulp into the bottom

bowl and hold back the seeds and skin.

After 4 minutes (I timed it) of work,

this is what was left.

I ended up with 4 trays of beautiful, smooth, delicious

tomato puree with ZERO seeds.

Less than 20 minutes of work probably saved

9 or more hours of freeze drying time.

(Those seeds really hang on to the moisture...)

And it will yield a MUCH nicer product.

Also a fray of diced no-heat jalapenos we

froze the other day.

Got that all done and the kitchen cleaned up

in just over 45 minutes.

Meanwhile the freeze dryer was all defroster,

so I opened it back up to let it come to

room temperature. (The hair dryer gets it

pretty HOT in there, but defrosts it in about

30 minutes instead of about 3 hours...)

Once it was room temp, I turned it back on

to start really cooling the chamber.

Took it from 96 to 36 in about 30 more

minutes.

And then I got 3 more trays of apples and

2 trays of grated zucchini out of the freezer

and put those in the FD to get dried.

Back into the house to do a quick blog post

and eat some leftovers from dinner.

And then I'm heading out to the farm to

check on the guys.

Whew!

I'm pleased with today's progress!