Autumn Harvest

Autumn is a sumptuous feast.  

It's the beginning of the "dying time" but as if in one last extravaganza Mother Nature puts on some of her most beautiful dresses and scatters far and wide her gifts of fine fruits, berries, nuts and other delightful fare.  Not content to merely trickle to us these treats she positively rains them down in seemingly endless buckets.  It's a wonderful thing and also sometimes a little intimidating to be presented with so much bounty!

It began with the pickles - cucumber, onion and capsicum.  Andrew poses with the jars we did a few weeks back, our second batch of "pretty pickles".

  

In March the pears are ready from our old Bon Chretian and Doyenne Du Comice pear trees.  We've dried some and began to bottle others in honey and cinnamon.

   

 

The apples start to trickle in - the Granny Smith, Royal Gala and Golden Delicious. 

We have begun to dehydrate some of the apples and pears.

Adventures In Dehydrating

I've had a small dehydrating machine for several years now but my recent purchase of a larger 1000 watt model second hand gave me the impetus to improve my skills in the art of drying food in this way.  This past weekend Andrew and I dried 6 trays of mixed fruit again, another adventure in dehydrating.

With a few earlier trial runs we'd already figured out:

1. Wipe the outside but DON'T dunk the fruit in water in a Vitamin C mix to stop it browning.  It really doesn't need it and it just makes the fruit a lot wetter to start with and harder to get just right in the dehydrator. Our undunked fruit seems to come out with a better texture and we found browning of the fruit really wasn't a problem.

2. Leave the skins on.  There is some good nutritional value in the skins and they add some extra colour and interest to the end product.

3. With most things a slice of about 1.2 cm or half an inch is about right.

In our latest session we did organic apples, pears and blackboy peaches from our orchard plus some bananas that we had on hand which were getting close to over-ripe.    We also put in two different kinds of grapes from our vines.  After 8 hours the apples, pears and peaches came out lovely, 

very moreish, although the peaches were quite tart immediately afterwards.  They seemed to regain some of their sweetness over the following hours.  

The bananas were divine.  I can see how they could get addictive!  What a great way to use up any bananas though, before they get too ripe - dry them and use them for yummy snacks. I am sure children in particular would love them.

The pictures below show some of our trays of raw fruit ready to be processed and then the end products.  We put this lot into plastic, ziplock bags and what a great snack they make.

Andrew blended a mix of the bananas, apples, pears and peaches and we agreed it would be wonderful in homemade muesli, muffins or fruit loaf. 

Dehydrating seems such a quick, easy, convenient way to help deal with a big surplus of fruit in the autumn.

 

Below :  At the end when we'd mostly mixed the apples, pears, bananas and peaches up together.