Freeze Dried Meal Recipes

 To make sure the meat gets fully dry, in our medium freeze dryer with four trays we do 1 1/2 lbs of ground burger in each tray.

 When we put them in, I select Start, non-liquid, not frozen (even if pre-frozen). Ground burger seems to take about 24 hours from start to finish. This can take longer, if I add more meat or use a meat that isn’t as lean. Again, check it by testing the product with the back of your hand and feeling for a cooler temperature than the tray it’s on.

 I usually line my trays with parchment paper. I’m torn on the necessity of lining the trays at all with ground burger since I use a spatula to unload the trays. I think either way is as effective as the other. I’ll probably stop using parchment paper simply because, if it’s not necessary, then why waste the paper?

 The coloring gets darker the more it dries. I think that’s a pretty color to package the freeze dried ground burger in. This would look nice in a Mason jar or something else, if you want to store it that way.

 As a mom one of my favorite things to do is to feed my family. It’s crazy to think I have to figure out how to feed a small army. Whether it’s during the every day life I have ahead of me with a full refrigerator and a store within 30 minutes or to somehow find a way when the going is rough and there’s no power or no way to get to fresh food. Even if we’re out camping or hunting, I want the option to feed my family delicious food.

 As long as I take easy-to-plan steps with the food that I do have now, or make small investments when I go to the store every week, I can prepare packages of food so that my kids can have hashbrowns and eggs and even sausage when other people might be scavenging for bark. This is possible, people! You have no idea what kind of horror stories I’ve heard!

 When you have a major holiday coming up – like right now with Thanksgiving – there are deals on specific foods. For instance, potatoes are on a huge sales. I got a 10 pound bag of potatoes for $0.99 at a local grocery store. There was no limit on how many I could buy. So, I bought 10.

 So what I do with a bag of potatoes first is wash them! Not with soap or anything like that, but I just give them a good scrubbing under some cool to lukewarm water.

 Then, I lay them out on a cookie sheet that is lined with parchment paper. I somehow got stuck with this horribly messy looking pan. I think my daughter put it in the dishwasher!

 Then you take a fork and stab each potato about 4 times. I had my 6-year-old help me and he went ballistic on some of them. It was fun, but wow. Bandaids might have been involved.

 Once the potatoes are stabbed and spread out on the parchment paper, you want to put them into the oven on 350 degrees for one hour. Then shut off the oven, but don’t take them out. Don’t even open the door to check on them. Trust me, there’s nothing to see!

 I like shredded hashbrowns because they seem to reconstitute easily without having to add water. I like to put them into a frying pan or a Dutch Oven and add in peppers, oil, and sometimes chunks of meat. As the steam from the peppers (usually fresh or frozen here) rises and mixes with the hashbrowns, the freeze dried hashbrowns reconstitute without getting soggy.

 You don’t need to cut up the potatoes or anything. Just grab a sturdy grater and position it inside a deep enough container. You can see the Tupperware I used here. Then you start grating.

 For the most part, the skin of the potato sloughs off and you don’t usually have too much in the potatoes themselves. Be careful as you grate so you don’t get your own skin in the sharp parts of the tool.

 At the end of preparing the homemade hashbrowns, you can see how the skin kind of stays together and then you can just toss it in the garbage or throw it into the chicken bowl (we have a bowl on our counter where we toss extra or castoffs that aren’t wanted that we take out to the hens every evening).

 The potatoes are already fairly dry after being cooked, but they’re not ready to be packaged yet. You want to freeze dry them to make sure they stay good for you to cook with later.

 Once the homemade hashbrowns run through their load, you can pull them out and feel how light and flaky they are. You’ll package them like you would just about anything else and make sure to label them. Don’t forget to include shredded or cubed or whatever state you’re storing them.

 Potatoes have to be cooked – baked or boiled – before they can be frozen, freeze dried, or even dehydrated. The carbohydrates/starches in the potatoes will turn grayish black, if you don’t do the proper baking before doing this. The baking and cooling is the easiest method to prepare potatoes versus boiling or something else.

 You can use pre-frozen hashbrowns from the store. Just dump the bags onto the lined trays and put them into the freeze dryer. They aren’t homemade, but sometimes those sales are more appealing then homemade. I’m all about easy and cheap. I’m a MOM!

Freeze Dry Cheesecake

 Potatoes stacked this way seem to take about 18 hours from start to finish. I don’t pre-freeze them unless I’m waiting for a load to finish or I’ve made too many for the load that I’m currently filling.

 Breaking “rules, is kind of my thing and I don’t stop at the tray height when I fill the trays. I usually go about half an inch over it. With potatoes being as light as they are and prepared this way, they aren’t sticky and they separate very easily. I don’t feel like I have to stick to a thin layer which means I can get more done in a shorter amount of time.

 I love the way these turn out. My husband doubted me, until I served a full course breakfast complete with hashbrowns, bacon, and eggs – all from my food storage/freeze dried collection.

 I should lie and say I love pumpkin spice cake and everything pumpkin flavored. Pumpkin flavored cocoa, creamery, egg nog, cookies, pie, cheesecake, bars, etc etc etc. Holy cow, everything seems to be pumpkin spice flavored or scented. EVERYTHING.

 I’m going to say something that is going to seem VERY blasphemous in our day and age and particularly during the holiday season. Look away, if you worship all things pumpkin.

 My family does NOT like pumpkin flavored anything. We only got a couple of these cans by accident because my mother left them at our house when she was shopping for Thanksgiving dinner ingredients. She said she didn’t want them back. I secretly think she left them on purpose. The conspiracies are strong around pumpkin flavored things.

 We all stared at those cans on the counter for a few days before I finally decided to try something with them. Anything to get rid of the cans of pumpkin filling.

 My oldest son loves pumpkin pie. This is so out of the ordinary for the rest of us, that I question if he was dropped off on the front stoop by a stork. He eyed those cans with a different glint in his eye.

 I looked up some basic pumpkin spice cake recipes and this is what I came up with. You don’t need the frosting for the freeze drying.

 I mixed everything well with a hand mixer on low because of the thickness of the mix. This looks almost like a thick pudding when you’re done.

 We greased a 9 x 13 inch glass pan with spray oil and then attempted to spread the thick cake mix into the pan. As you can see, it didn’t go in smoothly. This pumpkin spice cake mix fought me every step of the way.

 Phew! Once I wrestled that thick mix into the pan, I threw the pan in the oven on 350 degrees Fahrenheit and sat down and ate a non-pumpkin flavored treat. Probably something chocolate. Something not holiday centered so no mint, but definitely lots of chocolate. Maybe even like Butterfinger or something. Not that I’m getting specific.

 I had to scrape the excess mixture off the beaters with a spatula. That was fun. *can you sense the sarcasm?* I have 6 kids. That should be enough to understand that I don’t have energy for the extra things when I want everything as easy as possible.

 When I couldn’t get any more off the beaters, I held out the utensils and my oldest son licked them clean. Okay, whatever. I told you, I doubt he’s mine sometimes.

 This cake was done when I stuck a butter knife into the middle and it came out clean. About 40 minutes – because of the density of the cake mix.

 So initially, I started cutting the cake into one inch by one inchish pieces. That was a CLUSTER. It was such a crumbly mess. I wanted to scream. I might have eaten a few of them. It was crazy. There was so much chaos. I’m not sure where pumpkin spice cake ended and I began.