Sadie, the park and dehydrated pears

The fall colors are peaking, and Kurt and I had planned to take Sadie to a nature park today. It was raining lightly when morning came, but we went anyway. We want to get her used to the idea that a car can mean something other than being taken to the vet or dropped off forever. And a two mile hike in the woods is a nice way to start the day.

Sadie is a mixed breed, good sized dog, between one and two years old. She was adopted from a shelter by a man who opened an art gallery, then realized he had no time for the dog. He knew nothing about where she had been before that, or how she came to be at the shelter. She was skittish and insecure, and he worked with her a lot before deciding she deserved a home where she wasn't locked up alone for most of the day.

He first gave her to a family, but the dad turned out to be allergic to her. Next, she came here, a place where she has room to run, and many neighborhood dog friends.

She is content, sweet and very possessive of us. She has insecurities, particularly around men, and a stubborn streak, but all in all, she is a good, special dog.

When we got back, I set up the dehydrator with its daily run of sliced pears. I did plain ones today, but I sometimes vary them. My dehydrator has five trays. Had I realized how much I was going to use this appliance, I would have gotten a bigger one. There are ones that dry faster and more evenly, but they have fans. Mine is silent.

Drying is the easiest way to preserve food. I originally tried it in the sun. It worked, but insects laid eggs while they were drying. By late winter, my fruit had bugs.

If you dry mint at the same time as the fruit, the end product has a hint of mint. Now when we moved here, everything was mowed. No flowers, no herbs, no wild foods. So my first spring, I took two sprigs of mint from the patch we had growing at the restaurant where I worked, and planted them in my yard. A year later, I have a huge patch of 2 types of mint, just from those 2 sprigs. Dried, it makes nice tea. So I found that drying one tray of mint underneath 4 trays of pears yields a nice result. I have also sprinkled the sliced pears with cinnamon, ginger, allspice and cloves before drying.

I've also tried brushing them with wine, but it didn't do much. Cinnamon syrup didn't do anything either.

Pears and apples can dry naturally without preservatives. Other fruits, like apricots and peaches, are treated with sulfur. Apricots dried without treatment are brown and leathery, not the soft orange things you see in the grocery store.

It only takes about 15 minutes to fill the dehydrator, and another few to clean up. I end with with about a half gallon of peeling, cores and overripe pears, which I dump into a garden bed or into the blackberry bushes, where it can nourish the earth.