More fun with food!

Just when you start to think that this juice/smoothie kick may be reaching its limit....we introduce more weirdness!  Add to our growing list of appliances a dehydrator and watch what happens!  Last Thursday our new Excalibur 5-tray dehydrator arrived and we had already prepared the main ingredients for our first test.  Drum roll........Juice Pulp Crackers!!!  I know you've been sitting there salivating over our blog posts about juice and soup and wondering to yourself, "Now what are those crazy kids going to DO with all of the byproduct from their juicing?"  Up until now we saved it in a 5-gallon bucket, then incorporated it into our composting barrels.  But now we can eat it instead!!!!  It's simple, really. Just follow along: All you need is 2 cups of juice pulp (we have about 200 cups, so you can borrow some if you don't have 2 full cups), 1/2 cup ground flax seed, a little water, and seasonings.  Vitamix it for a minute or so, spread it out on your dehydrator sheets or some parchment paper, and just 8 short hours later you have deliciously fibrous "crackers" that look like they may have come from your lawn mower bag.  But seriously, folks, they're not as bad as they sound!! 

Instead of watching the Super Bowl on Sunday - a lack of cable can do that to a person - we invited a few people over for board games and snacks.  To prepare for our hosting duties we whipped up some delicious hummus and salsa!  Jay feels that he is closer each time to perfecting his salsa recipe and he got rave reviews.  By the end of our game afternoon all of the dishes had been wiped clean - all the feedback we needed. 

For his day off yesterday, Jay got down and dirty with the slowly diminishing pile of sequoia rings in the backyard.  Mighty Man Jay has whittled the pile down to almost nothing!  If you're still anticipating a cold snap this year, come and take some of our finely chopped wood!!

And lastly, to close this super-post, we come full circle with food.  Youtube is a wondrous thing and from some fairly specific googling we were led to a video on preparing tomato crackers in a food dehydrator. 
Flax seed, fresh and sundried tomatoes, red bell pepper, lemon juice, garlic = ---------->

This is the before product....end product taste is akin to pizza!! Jealous?