Day 6 - Onion Rings, and Time

OK, by this time, you are very certain that we are living in an alternate universe, where days are not 24 hours long, and weeks turn into months (or so it would seem). I am here to say that we do realize there are 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 28-31 days in a month, 52 weeks in a year and 365 1/4 days in a year. There. Now that that is out of the way, we can move forward.

Here is our problem...we have been so busy in the kitchen making butter and yogurt and drying things every day and canning...that we (I) have not gotten around to posting what we are doing. Neverfear, faithful reader, I have enlisted help! Help in the form of my darling daughter, Sweet Girl, who is taking on the project of writing our blog posts. Now 'all' I have to do is find the time to sit down to post them!

So without further ado, I present to you my Sweet Girl!

Dried Onion Rings

A few days ago we dried onions in the dehydrator. First we brought a pot of water to a boil.

While we were waiting we peeled and sliced the onions on #4 setting on the electric slicer.

Then, we broke up the circles. My brothers and I were crying and our eyes were burning so bad! While our eyes were burning, we wanted to know why onions make you cry so we watched a video on Youtube. We found out when you cut into an onion, you break its cells and gas comes out and gets into your eyes. We also found out that if you refrigerate your onions you won't cry when cutting them open.

After that we dropped about 3 handfuls of onions in the boiling water for about one minute. Then we took them out and layed them on a dryer tray that was on top of a baking sheet with sides.

We put the dehydrator tray over the sink, then we rinsed the hot onions with cold water to cool them. Thankfully, nobody got sprayed! It is okay if the onions overlap a little bit.

The last thing we did was to put the trays in the dryer and set the temp to 115 degrees. We left the onions in the dryer for about 24 hours and we rotated them every few hours so they would dry evenly.

Then we put the onions in jars and sealed them with an air sealer.

We started with 8 pounds of onions and ended up with 0.67 pound!

(Note: We learned from Grammmie that either these are not really Vidalia oinions, or that they are from last year which makes them VERY strong!)


I hope you will have as much fun dehydrating as I do. :-)



And a bonus for everyone who made it to the bottom of this post! Here is a picture of our very first Roasted Rooster Stew! I got tired of the kids asking "is this is Ruffles?! (he was the only one we named) so I said, "Yes, this is Ruffles." Now Ruffles is gone, so we are just eating chicken. So glad to have THAT out of the way!