The Miserable Business of Dehydrating

Dehydrating food is pretty high up there in lists of miserable business of a missionary life.
It takes FOREVER to prep food and FOREVER to dehydrate food and then when you eat it…
It's dehydrated food, guys. There's a reason you don't find this stuff in 5 star restaurants! …or any restaurant really.
When we get home on furlough, we will be raising money for a house and one component of that is a fridge/freezer + solar power to sustain it. That component alone is 10G! But if an hour of my time is worth $10, it's well worth it. (Someone recently told me I should value my time at $50/hr, but… idk. Stay humble, right?!)

UNTIL THEN, we have two years of dehydrating ahead of us.
With as much time as we will spend doing it, I decided to write a blog post to share this facet of our lives.

So I get a menu together. What are we going to eat in the bush?
We're grazers, so I plan a meal a day with a bit of surplus just for those hungry days.
Otherwise it’s a variety of ramen noodles, various kinds of crackers +/- peanut butter.
Oatmeal, granola, bush biscuits (kinda like a soft graham cracker) with peanut butter, or pancakes for breakfast.
Nothing to dehydrate there and so it's easy enough. (Though I do need to whip up a 2 gallon bucket of granola!)

I have a master list of ingredients in a spreadsheet, so I know just how many packets of coconut milk powder and boxes of heavy whipping cream and so on I need.
But the real beast isn't shopping for two months, but dehydrating for two months.

So I make a list of my recipes, and I divide out all the items that need to be dehydrated for said recipe. So we have 8 servings of most meals and 4 of the black bean soup, two for the spicy sweet potato soup, and 6 for the "lettuce wraps". The squares reflect the number of times the meal will be served and so each square counts for a meal's-worth of that ingredient. Which is a guesstimation. Like my life.

So prepping for beef is probably the most painless things. You brown it and it's ready to go!
Onions too are easy enough. Dice and dry.

But nearly everything else involves blanching. Ugh. The process of dropping veggies in boiling water for three minutes then in ice water for three minutes and THEN dehydrating. Try yesterday's task of slicing 30 carrots, and then, in small batches. Blanching them ALL! This isn't a three minute process anymore!! AND HOW DO YOU KEEP ICE WATER ICY WHEN YOU KEEP DROPPING BOILING HOT CARROTS IN IT?!?!?!
Guys, I've seen breadboxes bigger than our freezer. Even if we packed that thing with ice beforehand (oh look another painstakingly slow task!), we would not succeed in keeping the ice water icy.
But blanching's not the worst. Oh no.

Chicken.
Chicken is the worst.
IT doesn't WANT to rehydrate. Now if you get canned chicken, it will rehydrate to a palatable level but they don't sell canned chicken here! So we have to "can" it ourselves.
…
Does this sound miserable yet?
Ok, get a potato.
"What?!?!"
Yes. A potato. Put that in a pressure cooker with chicken broth for three minutes. (But it's not ACTUALLY three minutes, because you have to wait like 10 minutes for the pressure to get high enough and then FORVER for the pressure to drop afterwards. And that's still not enough time for the next step:)
Get out the chicken. As you can see above, I have two recipes that call for chicken. So I need 16 meal servings which is like 32 breasts. You don't want to do that all at one time! That would be miserable! So we'll be moderately miserable on 4 different occasions which … is … less miserable? over all?
So get out that chicken! And slice it all nice and thin. And then take a meat tenderizer and beat every little sliver to smithereens.
You will be splattered in raw chicken.
The kitchen will be splattered in raw chicken.
Your life will be splattered in raw chicken.
The tenderizer will be embedded in chicken and will be nearly impossible to clean.
If the baby starts crying, that's just too bad for her because you're coated in a layer of salmonella waiting to happen. You will need a shower. And be unclean until evening.
Ok, if the pressure cooker is unpressurized, you can mash the potato and drop the chicken in your weird potato soup concoction to start cooking. 10 minutes (But it's not ACTUALLY ten minutes, right?) Also, pressure cookers have been known to explode. So whisk your babies off to the nursery so they don't get bonked on the head with hot shrapnel. But don't touch them, because.. salmonella.
When the pressure finally releases after ALL THAT, you get to shred the chicken. Because shredded chicken has more surface area and will rehydrate better.
I think it's like a hour a breast so this is a great time to start binge watching some TV. Luckily, this all goes down in town where we have access to the electricity to run a TV and … the dehydrator…

Which takes FOREVER!
Like forever, forever.
It's been a learning experience.
We've had meat get … ahem… go bad. Very very very bad.
Veggies get moldy before they got dry.
EVERY TIME we dehydrate something, one of the trays breaks and we have to super glue it back together. We've gone through a lot of super glue…

So after it dries I put it in a ziplock with a silica gel packet and put that ziplock in another ziplock and I put THAT ziplock in an airtight container.
The PBT office has huge chest freezers with portions available for their village teams who, with and without freezers, need things frozen (we're going to put freezer meals for our return to town in it before we leave!) But I finally drop the dried food in the freezer because it "stops the clock" on its shelf life. And I don't want things going bad in the bush… And once it's there! It's finally, finally, done.

So the object of the game is to get all my squares filled across the page. First prepped, then dehydrating, then dehydrated (but in my air tight box), and finally in the freezer. Afterwards, I can weigh it all and add it to our helicopter cargo list.
(Can you live for 2 months on 800 lbs of cargo or less? Including your family and dog? Stay posted for how we plan to pull it off!)

It's been crazy. It's an experience that I can already laugh at, but I am so so so excited to have a fridge in like, you know, three years…

Coffee with Elizabeth - Packing and Desserts

"So, we meet again," I say stroking an imaginary cat. It is, of course, not a real cat, because even in our imaginations, cats are not allowed in Starbucks. That would be ridiculous.

You laugh, because, of course, stroking an imaginary cat inside a Starbucks and not a dark evil lair is also ridiculous.

"My mom ran a bakery out of her home for a while," I say dipping biscotti in my coffee. "She made these. If I stacked them very precisely in the display jars, I got to eat the heels! Later I found out it wasn't biscotti, but mandel bread that she made. I'm not sure if there's a difference, but I felt betrayed nonetheless."

A woman walks in with a rolling suitcase. It has a luggage tag displaying a platform number: 9 3/4. I'm covetous.

"I travel a lot," I contemplate aloud. "As I'm sure you know!" I bring my attention back to you and away from the Harry Potter paraphernalia that I long to call my own.

"It seems like I'm always packing. Like the name of the game is 'how strategically can I do this so my life will be less difficult later?' Currently, the aim is to pack everything I need for two months of bush living in less than 400kg and packed so it all spatially fits inside a helicopter. How much spatially can a helicopter hold? I'm not sure… But that just adds to the fun!" I cringe even as I try to make light.

"Two months is a long time. Too long to sleep on an air mattress that screams every time you move. Hopefully, we can fit a mattress in our spatial limits…

"Thanksgiving will happen. I already have two cans of pumpkin puree packed for pumpkin pie!"
I whip out my bullet journal to jot a note to pack pumpkin pie spice.

"There's so much in my head. Gotta have paper handy to catch it all," I say stowing my journal again.

"Jacob wants peanut butter cookies for Halloween. I tried to put all the ingredients in a jar, but it turns out a cup of sugar and a cup of brown sugar and two and a half cups of flour, etc won't fit into a pint sized jar. Jacob said I could divide the recipe. He doesn't seem to understand that means less cookies…

"I don't think we'll be able to crave a pumpkin. They have pumpkins (more like miscellaneous gourds…) but to explain the practice... 'Well, it was to scare away demons… But not anymore! Now it's just fun! This has nothing to do with demons! Anymore… Yes, well, if you have pagan traditions you shouldn't do that, but we can… redeem them… by making them… frivolous? Frivolously wasting food by letting it rot for the sake of …not scaring off demons…' Yes, best to avoid pagan practices…

"But that's only the first step! The second step is to make sure the return is smooth! What do I need when I get back to town? This go round we'll be coming home just in time for Christmas, which means not only should town clothes and toiletries be at the ready but also Christmas décor and peppermint extract.

"You see, it's hardly Christmas without a peppermint cake! And with so many Christmas staples missing here in PNG, it's important to emphasize what we can. My mother always made a three layer peppermint cake for Christmas. She would crush peppermint to dust the peppermint icing with the lovely fragments and stand up three peppermint rounds in the center, all nearly touching in the middle. 'Three' she'd say placing them carefully, 'is aesthetically pleasing. Not two. Not four. Three.' So I make it the same way. I made two last year for the Christmas Eve Branch Party. One melted and the other didn't. I'm not sure why…

"But that's only the second step! The third step is preparing to go the bush AGAIN! I mean, I come home for 6ish weeks. (That's the tentative plan at least.) And we decorate for Christmas, have Christmas and New Years and all the festivities thereunto.

(The New Year's Tradition is orange icing cinnamon rolls for breakfast. My grandmother used to have them whenever we came to visit and they were so yummy, so they were substituted for my mother's tradition of a huge breakfast banquet, since our little family can't be expected to put away a banquet! Not yet at least...)

And then a whole week is devoted to the Branch's Annual General Meeting! Basic living is time consuming enough! I need cargo to be ready! 

"So where is our shower toiletry hanger? And do we need it to come out on our next trip or not? Extra pots? Extra pans? Where did that clock get to? And so on and so forth. With many things already stowed, I don't know how well of a job we'll do on this third step. But I've found the packing process to be less than perfect.

"Practice makes perfect, but to err is human.

"I don't mind coffee on my almonds, but I hate almonds in my coffee," I lament looking wistfully at the telltale rings from where a chunk of biscotti fell in my cup.