Food Dehydration

Make Your Own Dried Food

We all love dried food, whether it be fruit, veg, to eat or just for decorations. And making your own is always more satisfying than just buying from a shop. Plus you know where it has come from and what has been on your food.

Personally, I love to make my own raisins. My mum purchased a dehydrator a few months ago and I can honestly say I love it!

Dehydrators are usually about £30-£40 but they do range in price considerably. I will post some links at the bottom to ones that I think are good prices.

So, without further ado, here is how to on homemade raisins:

What are the advantages of drying your own?

Well, for a start, it is always more satisfying when you make your own things, but there are also advantages to the environment as well; such as:

1. your food/decorations have not been sprayed with extra pesticides, preservatives or cleaning materials
2. you know where your food/decorations have come from
3. they do not come in single-use plastic packages, which would no doubt be thrown into the bin and never seen again
4. your food/decorations have travelled less miles, yes you picked up your ingredients from the super market, but your end product didn't have to travel miles and miles to reach its final destination, which is of course, better for the planet.
5. you can make as much or as little as you like, and only you have control over how it turns out at the end.
6. you are using up things that might have been thrown away and wasted (using up fruit/veg that has slightly past its edible point to make decorations or drying out grapes that have gone a bit too squishy to consume)

What you will need:

• Dehydrator
• Fruit/Veg you want to dry out
• Some way of preparing you fruit/veg (cutting board, knife etc)

Step By Step - dehydrator

1. Make sure your food is clean
2. Prepare your food/decorations
3. Place them in your dehydrator and set for a minimum of 6 hours (different materials will take longer time to dry out but 6 hours is a good starting point)
4. Sit back and relax

You Can Also Dehydrate Things In An Oven, Here's How:

1. use the same preparation method you would have used if you were using a dehydrator
2. set the oven to 70°C (do not go any higher because then your produce would be baked rather than dried)
3. make sure there is good ventilation in your oven (put on the fan setting or keep the oven door slightly open)
4. keep checking your produce every couple of hours

If you want your produce to be crispy then you will need to leave them to dry out more than if you wanted them slightly chewy

Some Useful Sites:

The Kitchen

WikiHow To Dry Foods

Places to get Dehydrators:

Lakeland

UK Juicers

Amazon

Excalibur

Ebay

All About Ecosia

Ecosia - What It's All About

So, on my list of Other Eco Blogs/Websites I mention Ecosia, when that link is clicked it will take you to a search engine. A bit like Google or Bing, but Ecosia is different. They donate 80% of their profit to planting trees. So far over 4,300,000 trees have been planted all over the world and there are over 2,000,000 users.

Just like any other search engine, Ecosia makes it's profits from adverts, they get paid for every time someone clicks on an advert, just like any other search engine. 80% of this goes to planting trees, and by 2020 the Ecosia team are hoping to be able to plant 1,000,000,000 trees!

Most of the trees being planted are across the equator and the Ecosia team are helping to rebuild 'the great green wall'. To find out more about 'the great green wall' click here and here

A link to their website is here

How to make Ecosia your default search engine:

1. Open up a new window/tab in your current default search engine
2. Search 'Ecosia' and click on the top result in your search
3. There should be a '...' in the top right hand corner, however the place of this may vary for each person
4. Click on the '...'
5. Click on 'settings'
6. Scroll down to 'advanced settings'
7. Scroll down until you find your current default browser
8. There should be an arrow pointing down next to your current browser
9. Click on the arrow
10. Scroll down until you can find 'Ecosia'
11. Click on it
12. Save your settings

Happy Planting!

The Washed Ashore Project

The Washed Ashore Project - Website

  


"The Washed Ashore Project is a non-profit, community-based organization with a mission of educating and creating awareness about marine debris and plastic pollution through art. Washed Ashore is a project of The Artula Insitute for Arts & Environmental Education, whose mission is to provide opportunities to express and teach environmental issues through the arts.

Under the leadership of Angela Haseltine Pozzi, community members of all ages work together to clean up out beaches and process the debris into art supplies to construct giant sculptures of the sea life most affected by plastic pollution. This has resulted in thousands of pounds of debris removed from local beaches and turned into works of art. These unique art pieces are part of a traveling exhibition that includes educational signage and programs that encourage reducing, refusing and reusing, repurposing and recycling.

As lead artist, Angela Haseltine Pozzi orchestrates the construction of these towering, aesthetically striking sculptures of marine life with the assistance of many volunteers and a dedicated staff. Angela has been an exhibiting artist and educator for more than 30 years and now chooses to use at as a powerful tool to encourage community and environmental action about her true passing...cleaning up the world's oceans.

90% of the debris we collect is petroleum-based: plastic items, nylon ropes and net. We are able to use 98% of this trash to create sculptures, including a walk-through replica of an ocean gyre, a Styrofoam coral reef, Henry the fish, a plastic bottle sea jelly, an oil-spill replica , and a musical sea star (tuned to an e-flat scale!). An interdisciplinary environmental arts curriculum and feature-lengeth documentary are in progress to accompany this work."

Since Washed Ashore's launch in 2010:

• 12,000+ volunteers participated
• 10,000+ school students involved
• Over 65 sculptures have been built
• Over 17 tons of debris processed
• 300+ miles of coastline beach debris used
• Over 15 million people will see their exhibits
• 95% of debris is petroleum-based
• They're still using 98% of debris collected

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT WASHED ASHORE - click here

DID YOU KNOW?

About 300 million lbs of plastic is produced each year globally - less than 10% of this is recycled!

The most common things to be found in the sea are:

Single-use plastic bags

Toothbrushes

Fishing equipment

Single-use water bottles

Toys

Knowing all this and having projects like Washed Ashore out there, for everyone to learn from and be involved in, how can we sit here and tell ourselves that we will not make a difference? How can we continue with our lives knowing that we are destroying our planet? And why is it okay for us to cast huge issue aside and dismiss it as an over exaggeration?

It is estimated that by 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. And we are going to let this happen?

This is not acceptable.

This is not okay.

This must be changed.

Refuse single-use plastic. Reuse as much as you possibly can. Recycle everything you can think of and in any way you can imagine.

Help your planet. Protect your world.

                                      

My Bucket List

Here is a list of all the things I want to do in my lifetime! Once I have done them I will highlight them...

• Walk the American Discovery Trail
• Travel to Germany
• Volunteer in Africa
• Complete my Pinterest boards
• Write a travel journal
• Buy a polaroid camera
• Go on a banana boat
• Sponsor a snow leopard
• Take my mum on a luxury spa day
• Raise more than £10,000 for charities
• Make honeycomb and mint ice cream
• Write an article for a newspaper
• Fall in love
• Overcome my illnesses
• Climb a mountain
• Read 'Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy'
• Own my own house
• Go to India
• Swim with sharks
• Get a job I love
• Drum in a band

As I find things I will add them.