Drying Oranges

"Florida oranges are so juicy that you have to eat them in the bathtub"
Californian saying

I have been way too busy and had far too much company to keep up with all the things going on in my kitchen. Since I last wrote, we have been going steadily along with few stopping points.

For Christmas, we were given a huge box full of ORANGES! We didn’t want them to go bad so we filled a bowl full to eat as snacks. I scrubbed, dried, sliced and dehydrated several containers full and we used up a good portion of the box making orange juice.

The house has smelled happy and delicious as a result of all our orange “harvesting” and other preparations.

So far, I have the ideas from previous and present researching:

to make hot teas with the dried orange slices, use the dried peels and pieces in potpourri, and to have a skin toning bath with a scattering of them in the bath water.

Something else I might try is to heat up some sugar, dried orange slices, and a little water in a sauce pan. I read somewhere you could stew into a thin syrup and pour this over desserts and more.

I added one to a cup of hot chocolate and it was delicious! It tasted like one of those chocolate oranges melted and mixed with hot milk. Smiles.

I need to keep reading up on dehydrating so I can prepare for this summer when we plan to have our first real garden. We want to do a lot of drying because I don’t do a lot of canning and we are still saving up for a freezer so there isn’t much space there. I’ll be exploring several ways of food preservation as we go along but I love drying foods, flowers and herbs.

I started dehydrating many years ago but we’ve always used everything up too quickly to store it. This summer, I hope to have enough to stock up on often used foods and will bag them up with the Food Saver and Mason jars.

Just a quick share...smiles.