Dehydrated and Loving It

          My husband and I did lots of fun stuff during our 5 year honeymoon before kids.  We cooked together and entered county fairs.  M. won first place in Monterey County for his vanilla ice cream and I  picked up an award or two at the San Diego fair.  I was reminiscing about those fun years and remembered that we made beef jerky quite often.  As I rummaged around in my recipe box I found several more recipes we need to try again- Pulled Mints and Fortune Cookies- but no jerky recipe.  Fortuntely, I have Alton Brown on speed dial (he's from Alpharetta, you know.)

           I found a recipe of his online (I was kidding about speed dial.) and HG and I went to work.  It always cracks me up when I read a recipe online and in the comments section people say stuff like, " I don't eat meat so I just substituted celery for this recipe and I don't understand why it turned out horrible."  or "I followed the recipe exactly but I added the following 5 ingredients and left out these 3.  Tastes great."  Well, that's exactly what I did to Alton's recipe.  I am the boss in my kitchen.

           I like Alton, but he has some kooky ideas sometimes- funny hair too.  His recipe called for using air filters and a box fan to dry the meat.  Extra points to him for being inventive, but it's not happening here.  We made the first batch using very lean top sirloin and dried it at 150 degrees in the oven overnight.  Now, we live in Hawaii.  Meat is expensive but electricity is like solid gold. I haven't received this month's bill yet but  I hate to see how much that batch is going to cost me.  So- like any girl who wants to save money, I decided to buy an $80.00 dehydrator.  It was on sale for $60.00 and I got free shipping with Amazon, so I've already saved $20.00! (400+ people liked this one enough to leave positive comments on it.)
        
           HG is an accomplished sous chef and she recommended making a batch and adding teriyaki.  We split the batch and made half regular Alton and half teriyaki.   Sure enough, the teriyaki was hands down the favorite.  This jerky is even better than the honeymoon years recipe!  (If you're going to try it we made a full recipe of Alton's and then used one part Alton's and one part Teriyaki sauce.)

             Did you know that you can make beef jerky out of ground beef?  I didn't until this week.  You add a ton of salt and spices and then use a cookie press to extrude the meat.  It looks wretched but actually tastes very good.  Not as good as Half Alton/Half Teriyaki though.  It was an interesting process so I thought I'd take some pictures to show you how easy it is.  Ours dried in about 6 hours.  We dehydrated apples and applesauce (fruit leather) but we ate it before I could take after pictures.
  
           I feel like Lewis and Clark over here.  Give me a week and I think I could dry enough food to last us the winter.  One of my little fears about homeschooling was that I might become one of "those" counter cultural homeschooler people who like to grind their own wheat, drink unpasturized milk and stuff.  I don't think making jerky counts so I'm doing okay there.  (And hugs to my homeschooling friends who do all of the above!)