VT. Country store now sells dried cantaloupe. They dip in sugar, water, ascorbic acid, and then dry it. Those inexpensive yellow sticky traps work great. They remain sticky. As I mentioned, I don't like seeing any gnats in my newly started seedings in spring, so the traps are a nice way to monitor the activity too. Within a minute or two, they can catch several, which tells me the plants need a Bt treatment to kill of the damaging maggots they produce. I have a small toaster oven that bakes by convection too, its got a dehydrate setting, but it seems to get just beyond 'ouch' point, which to me is over 160 degrees. One year, I dried about 2 bushels of sweet green and red peppers. It did take a week or more, as both units were fully loaded, and had to run two batches through. These are done in the Ronco unit, which has no fan, but has a low temp ring heater at the bottom. It never gets any hotter there above 150 degrees, and uses simple air movement through the bottom below the heater. Only issue is I must rotate the round trays about 1-2 times per day, then rotate/restack the top trays back to the bottom area.

Danni girl, I'm so glad you had such a great harvest and were able to put up so many tomatoes. That is just wonderful, and especially in a year with such challenging weather. I do slice the bite-sized tomatoes in half, but I leave the two halves attached to one another by a thin piece of skin so I only have to pick up and move half as many from the cutting board to the cookie sheet. For years I processed tomatoes the hard way and then, finally, last summer I broke down and purchased a Roma/Villaware strainer. I should have bought one 20 years ago. It is AMAZING how quickly it removes all the skins and seeds. I always thought of a strainer as a 'frivolous' purchase, but it saved me tons and tons of time. I don't understand why your dehydrator isn't drying the tomatoes more evenly. Is it on a fixed temperature or can you change it? Farmgardener, You're welcome. 'Me' is the only person I know how to be, and it is getting scarey. I am turning into my grandmother. (My mom didn't garden or can.) I like to think that my mammaw would be proud of the gardener and food preserver I've become. I still can't grow strawberries here in our clay like she could grow in her sandier soil, though. I like knowing where our food came from and how it was grown and processed. I like knowing I don't put chemicals on it. I like knowing it isn't contaminated by salmonella or e. coli and I especially like knowing our food traveled 100' from the garden to the house, and not 1500 miles across the country. And I like freaking out people who say things like "you grew it yourself?" or "you make your own pickles ( or salsa or jelly or whaever)". I don't even mind when they tell me that I'm a 'dying breed' and that the home food growing and preservation arts are becoming a "lost art". I, by the way, do not agree with that. I see both edible gardening and home food preservation coming back into vogue again. See, some of us have been doing all this food raising/food preserving for so long that we're back in style. LOL Megan, As you can imagine, it took me a while to type it up but I wanted to be as thorough as possible. I used to help my dad can his tomatoes and salsa in the 1970s (I was just a kid) so I knew it took oodles of tomatoes to boil down into a sauce and still, the very first time I turned 40 or 50 pounds of fresh tomatoes into canned sauce, I was shocked at how relatively little sauce I had to show for all that work and all those tomatoes! I had dabbled with dried tomatoes for a few years before a friend of mine here in Oklahoma conviced me to get more serious about it, and now I'm hooked on it. With the comvection oven, I can dry six cookie sheets of tomatoes at once. Finally y'all, I ought to stress that the garden and the processing of all the produce is possible only because I'm a stay-at-home wife/mom whose child is an adult and can take care of himself. I could NEVER do everything I do if I worked at a paying job or if I had young children, with young being anyone under at least the age of 16. Once they can drive themselves places, parents regain a certain amount of their freedom. Even though I do things on a larger scale, lots of folks here also raise enough tomatoes and other veggies to can them and freeze them and put them up for the non-gardening season. Sometimes on long, hot days when I've been in the kitchen seemingly all day, I get tired and frustrated because it seems like 'it's never gonna end'. Then, after the last freeze hits and the growing season is basically over, I feel really sad like 'I can't believe it is over'. And, of course, in the winter time, that's the real payoff...when you can do your 'grocery shopping' from the pantry, the freezer and the root cellar. Dawn

I've worked my way up to baking four pizzas at a time over the last twenty years. So in my dual 30" convection Therms I have three mismatched 14" x 16" pizza stones from different manufacturers, all fairly thick but not the same, and my fourth most recent purchase was the same size baking steel to try that out for comparison. And for the most part, they all pretty much do the same great job with slight time variants that you can account for with your eyeballs. My first eighteen or so years I was all about the corn meal for moving the pizzas off of the peels and onto the stones. Then I bought one of the aluminum peels and the cornmeal flat out didn't work - the dough stuck no matter how much corn meal I used. And you know - corn meal on the 500 degree stone eventually talks to your smoke detectors. Out of necessity I tried parchment instead - and it works brilliantly! I've completely switched after all these years. Allows me to pre-prep four pizzas on parchment, (there is no risk of sticking to the peel while making the others), the pizza cooks right on the stone through the parchment, and after four or five minutes I'll slide the aluminum peel under each and slip out the parchment to extra crisp the crust. I keep the parchment aside and use that under each pizza when I slice it to absorb dripping/steam and keep the crust crisp. I preheat the oven and stones to 500 or 525 for at least 30 minutes before the first batch, and my pizza is super thin crust, about 6-8 minutes baking. Oh, and the parchment also works to get pizza and flat bread transferred over and started on the grill - directly on the grates. That stuff is magic, not just for cookies.

Lars, thanks for that link. Elery is checking out the pizza making forum right now. I did make the dough in the bread machine, but you're right, 2/3 of the dough would be a better size, it made two large pizzas, with leftovers. If one hadn't been charred, there would have been too much. Steve, we made pita bread in it this weekend, but can't seem to find any instructions to bake artisan breads. I think it will be an experimental learning process, but I definitely intend to try. Sally, that particular grill/stove came with a griddle and three burners with a 30,000 BTU BTU capacity each. It's also somewhat portable, so it'll go to the farm to heat the water to pluck poultry and I will use it outdoors for canning, at least water bath canning. I'm not sure I can regulate the burner enough for a pressure canner, but perhaps when I am more used to it. The total cost for stove, griddle, pizza oven and shipping was less than $500 and it's a "multi-tasker" as I can use it for a grill, a pizza oven, a griddle for outdoor breakfasts, canning, poultry processing and bread baking. So far I'm happy, Elery's happy and the thing got good reviews, so we'll see how that goes. We've had the stove/grill for a while, after my $59 gas grill from Menards burned his eyebrows when the burner collapsed. (OK, that's not really funny, but it is in a twisted sort of way, LOL) The grill came from Amazon, free shipping with Prime, but of course he found the pizza oven somewhere else so had to pay shipping. We'll see how it goes with more use. Our goal is to have an outdoor, woodfired oven at the farm but we don't want to do that until we are ready to build there. Annie This post was edited by annie1992 on Mon, Oct 14, 13 at 22:46