Adventure Or Emergency

I don’t use a fancy dehydrator, but I do use extra trays, screens and flat trays. Click the picture to see more info or to shop at the affiliate. By using my link, I get credit for directing people to their site and may make a small commission if you do purchase anything. You do not have to purchase any item that I promote and there is no charge to you for using the link. I may make a small commission that will help pay for my costs of producing the stories each day. Thank you

I planned to set up a few meals ahead to keep my crew fed while I am away next week. While trying to decide what easy to re-heat dishes to fix, I noticed that the pantry was in disarray. I have been running the dehydrator most of the summer and had bags and bags of everything from a variety of veggies to any of fruit I could get my hands on and lots of walnuts. So I set about cleaning up the pantry.

Just getting started with my cleaning and organizing, I realized that I had not made up my snack packs of ’emergency fruit.’ It sounds like preparing for a disaster, so my niece dubbed the concoctions as ‘adventure fruit’ to make the packs sound like more fun than catastrophe preparedness, but I keep going back to the old reliable name. I have always carried a packet of dried fruit around, just in case. One can find packets in the middle console of the car, some in each pickup, most coat pockets…in fact Mike pulled out the winter jacket he wears when the weather is really ugly (he hadn’t looked at it since January) and there in the pocket was a packet of emergency fruit. Or it HAD been emergency fruit before it had gotten wet and smashed while he was planting trees, then dried out and hung in the garage through the summer. I made him throw it out.

Since I know I will be away from home for a few days (I know I keep mentioning this, but it is a big deal to meal since it has been quite a while since my last excursion), I pulled out all the fruit and nut packages to sort out those stragglers that were left over from last year before. I think I got them all and left all the harvests from this year heaped up on the kitchen table while I started making snack pack and quart sized packages of mixed fruit and nuts, making sure to use up all of the oldest fruit.

There was a pretty good variety for the mixtures ranging from strawberries, apples, pears, peaches, prunes, figs with a smattering of walnuts and filberts. Since we didn’t get a single filbert from our trees this year because of critters, I planned on pulling some out of the freezer from last years harvest. While I was in the big deep freezer, I realized that I needed to retrieve some supplies to make the meals for next week.

By this time, the pantry items were scattered all over the kitchen table. The pantry itself looked like a tornado had torn through it. The deep freeze was a jumble because last years filberts were at the bottom, of course. And I still haven’t gotten around to making some meals for when I am away. My adventure is going to be an emergency situation if I don’t settle down and get my planning back on track.