FREEZE DRIED MEAL RECIPES

 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!

 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.

Freeze Dried Pears

 After I failed at anything remotely neat and tidy, I switched to bars that were just over an inch wide and then three inches long. You can see in the picture below where I tried the smaller bites and they were just awful looking and where the bigger pieces look a lot better and were a lot easier to maneuver.

 Before I put the cake into the freeze dryer, I was amazed at how moist the finished pumpkin spice cake was. While I expected a strong pumpkin flavor, I’m happy and more than a little surprised to share that the predominant flavor in this cake was spice. The pumpkin flavoring was so subtle, it would have been fine to serve as it was to my family and they never would have known it had the hated pumpkin in it.

 While I’m talking tough, I actually really did like this cake after it was cooked. I was so surprised by the flavor that I offered a piece to all the kids and didn’t tell them what was in it. They all liked it and now they’re asking for pumpkin flavored stuff. Ugh, but also, hmmm now I want to try more (just no pie!).

 Wow, look at that coloring. You can see there’s no moisture in these cake slices. They were very light in both color and weight. Their initial crumbling was controlled as well. The ground burger coloring changed like this too.

 They reminded me of an untidy biscotti. I gave the small bite sized ones to the kids to try and they loved it. I even ended up giving some of the bars in the big size to them as well. The freeze drying process seemed to take away even more of the pumpkin flavor. By the time I put these into the Mylar bags, they tasted like spice cake cookies. I even went and bought more pumpkin pie filling. It was almost as embarrassing as when I buy imitation vanilla extra – I’m a baking snob. Let’s be honest.

 Many people think it’s next to impossible to do the freeze drying for themselves. This is far from factual. Freeze drying at home is made easy by Harvest Right. They sell three different sizes of freeze-drying machines that do everything in the machine – except prep and package. That’s up to you.

 For all intents and purposes, here at Freeze Drying Mama we use the medium sized freeze dryer. You can check out the sizes offered at Harvest Right here. What this machine does is first freeze the items on stainless steel trays to -41 degrees or lower. This takes about 10 hours or so. Then a vacuum pump turns on and creates a vacuum inside the drum. This is the drying stage and will vacillate the heat of the tray up and down to a pretty warm temperature. This makes the frozen items release any water in them in vapor form. The vacuum sucks the moisture to the drum and this collects in ice form on the inner circle of the drum. Then there’s the final dry which is essentially the same thing, but with a time associated with it.

 In our family, we all seek natural ways to take care of our bodies and our health. Freeze dried raspberry powder is known for multiple health benefits to include:

 Antioxidants, such as Vitamins C and E, selenium, beta carotene, lutein, lycopene, and zeaxanthin, and let’s not forget about flavonoids! Antioxidants help the body eliminate toxic substances that come from external sources like unhealthy foods and pollution.

 Fiber. Who doesn’t need fiber!? I love fiber and on keto, I need all the fiber I can get. Fiber can help manage or prevent health issues such as blood pressure, obesity, cholesterol levels, heart disease, and stroke. As most everyone knows, fiber helps with digestion, cancer prevention, and helping with diabetes.

 After all the healthy benefits are covered, you have to go with the biggest reason to love raspberry powder – the taste it brings to whatever it’s added to. Rhonda, my mother-in-law, uses raspberry powder in smoothies and other things. In fact, she contributed the images and the information for this post! I just get to try the product when she’s done. Lucky me!

 Freeze dried raspberry powder is very versatile. Add your powder to dishes like pancakes, frosting for flavor and color, cake mixes, waffles, breads like banana bread, cookies, and like I said above, smoothies! Rhonda also likes to add the freeze dried raspberry powder to hot chocolate, ice cream, kefir, yogurt and more (sometimes it needs a little sweetening).

 Freeze drying raspberries into a powder turned out to be a necessity. If you could only see the abundance of berries in Rhonda’s garden, you’d understand why this was important for her to do. She started out by pureeing raspberries in 3 1/4 cup portions (enough for a batch of freezer jam) and put them in FoodSaver bags in the freezer. These bags lie flat and freeze nicely, stacking in beautiful packets that are ready to be used at a later time.

 Even with Rhonda’s generosity in giving many of her frozen bags of raspberry puree away to family, she still found that the ones she kept at home were taking up valuable freezer real estate. After she got the freeze dryer, she decided to free up some space by freeze drying some of the puree into raspberry powder.

 Out of the eight blocks of frozen puree that Rhonda put in, most of them were completed after about 35 hours (she selected not frozen, liquid before selecting start).

 A few needed a little more drying time which she could tell because she touched the tray and found some spots to still be cool. Something that dense (with all the seeds) needed to turn the blocks about halfway through because the bottoms weren’t getting dried.