Tomato Flops: Perfect for Pizza

We are in love with our dehydrator. Slice produce up, season it (or not), and place it all on trays. Turn the dehydrator on, slide the trays in, and forget about it. Half a day later, poof! Dehydrated, preserved garden goodies.

One example is what we call Tomato Flops. We got this idea from The Genius: Mrs. Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, but have adapted it over the past few years to our own liking. These flops are stupendous on pizza in the winter. They pop like little bursts of summer in your mouth!

Here's how we made ours:

Ingredients:
Roma Tomatoes
Dried Italian herbs (Oregano, Basil, Parsley, Savory, Thyme, etc...)
Garlic (if desired)

Process:
1. Slice Roma tomatoes in half. 
2. Sprinkle with desired amount of herbs. Top with a very thin slice of garlic, if you enjoy that sort of thing. We did one tray with garlic and herbs, but the rest were just covered with herbs.
3. Dehydrate until desired consistency. We recommend not completely dehydrating them. We let ours go about 12 hours.
4. Since we don't dry them completely, we freeze them in bags for winter use.

Last weekend, we froze 10 bags, with a dozen flops each. They're piled in the freezer, waiting to bring us a bit of sunshine in the middle of our Wisconsin Winter.

Before

After

Herbs and Berries! Oh my!

Last week, we harvested several herbs from our herb garden, including lavender, chamomile, basil, oregano, curly parsley, and flat-leaf parsley. My mom (Darcy's) surprised us by buying us a much-needed dehydrator, which we tried out for the first time on our herbs. Additionally, we dehydrated several cups of mulberries from our second harvest.

Before we had a dehydrator, we dried herbs by putting them in the oven or hanging them upside down in a cool, dark place. The dehydrator makes drying much more convenient, but herb drying is 100% possible without one.

For our lavender and chamomile, we followed the same process, but did much more research prior to harvesting as this was our first attempt at tea herbs. We learned that when the chamomile flowers have white petals, it is time to harvest. If the white petals begin falling off, it's too late. To obtain them, I simply plucked the flowers off with my fingers; I found this to be the most efficient way to quickly harvest. As for the lavender, I cut the stems about three inches below the purple flowers. Both herbs were dehydrated in the dehydrator and stored in Mason Jars, which were then placed in our food pantry.

The mulberries needed to be dehydrated for much longer ~ 12 hours! What a delicious addition they will be to our bowls of cereal this winter!