New York Renovator

I have wanted a dehydrator FOREVER. We all like to eat dried fruits, but the prices at the grocery store are excruciating. For years, I kept promising myself (and the kids) that we’d get a dehydrator… someday.

Well, I recently got a bonus at work, and shelled out the big bucks for the Nesco GardenMaster Dehydrator. I got it online for a little over $100. I hope the fruit tastes good, at least good enough to make the big expense worthwhile…

The dehydrator is huge– I didn’t expect it to be so large– and comes with a nice recipe book and a package of spices for making jerky. I haven’t scrutinized the recipe book; it’s pretty basic, though. I was eager to try dehydrating some fruit (before it rotted away!) so I skipped the recipes to simply try out the dehydration machine.

The machine comes with 4 trays and 2 plastic tray liners. The trays are made of plastic, resembling netting. After a lot of use, I could see these becoming brittle and cracking. Nice thing is that replacement trays are available. You can also stack additional trays if you have large loads to process.

I decided to dehydrate my rapidly ripening papaya, and a few very over-ripe Anjou pears. The instructions say to avoid under-ripe and over-ripe fruits, but what do they know. (haha)

The dehydrator has a temperature control (95 to 155 degrees F) and on/off switch. It has no timer or automatic shut off (a real bummer). Since most loads take anywhere from 8-12 hours, you have to get your own timer and make sure you are home (or awake) to turn off the dehydrator. To do four trays of pretty juicy fruits, I set the control for 145 degrees, and ran it for 10 hours.

The dehydrator fan is NOISY. You know how noisy an uninsulated dishwasher can be? It’s about that loud. If yo can, run it at night, or expect to holler through your kitchen duties. It’s noisy.
The fruit turned out pretty good! I think I sliced the papaya a little too thin, but it’s still good. They are crunchy and feel like paper. But stil very edible and they are terrific with mixed nuts and raisins. The pears are magnificent. They are chewy and so sweet, with a slight taste of wine about them. I could devour handfuls of them, but then I would have to look for some phenphedrine cheap.

The Nesco Gardenmaster can dry fruits, vegetables, herbs, jerky, granola, etc. I am looking forward to trying the jerky, and experimenting with fruits like bananas and mangoes. For $107, it is pretty pricey. If you don’t use a dehydrator often, a smaller unit would do just as well.
So far, so good. I like this appliance and it works well for me. If anything develops, good or bad, I’ll be back to report. Thanks for reading!

Note: I was not given this product nor compensated in any way for this review. All the opinions are mine and the facts are true to the best of my knowledge.

All the fancy schmancy rigamarole about vitamins, supplements, organic foods, non-organic foods and etc got you baffled? Yeah, me too. Here’s a really neat site to help us out of our bafflements (and I love the title, too): The Whole Story.

It’s a website dedicated to educating everyone how to eat healthier. They have a special supplements podcast right now, called “The ABC’s of Supplements,” detailing the in’s and out’s of everything supplements. It’s done by a nutritionist, Malia Curran. She unravels some of the mystery of the terminology and regulation of supplements, answers questions, and more. This is a good one– if you’re into heavy-duty nutrition, you’ll want to check it out.

I’ve frequented this site several times in the past, for their recipes and information on various nutritional foods. It’s a very good site! If you are interested in anything food (and we all are, at least as far as eating is concerned!), then you will like the site. I’ve never heard any of the podcasts, though. They do sound interesting. It’s the online cooking show that I like! The site is an extention of Whole Foods Market, one of the leading organic and natural foods supermarket. At the site, you can check for store locations, find tips and facts, recipes, products, and loads more stuff! It’s a great place to send homeschooled kids to for their home economics lessons, too.

This video is called “The Vegetable Orchestra” and shows people making and playing vegetables as musical instruments. As I watched it, and had to wonder: is this for real?! Are they really making clarinet sounds with that carrot, or has it been overdubbed? It’s a rather long video, but the most interesting part is when it shows them making the vegetables into musical instruments.

Something about it irks me, though. I think it’s because it seems wasteful. Who knows, maybe they have a vegetable pot luck dinner in their las vegas suites after the concert. I certainly hope so.