Recently we've had a food challenge to deal with in our family, and several friends and coworkers suggested that we should consider using a home dehydrator.
It's quite possible you're now having the same response that we had: "What's a home dehydrator?" Let me start at the beginning.
One of our kids has always been a picky eater, at least compared with his siblings.
There's never been a real pattern to his likes and dislikes, but he's definitely the child we've worried about slightly when it comes to nutrition.
After a routine blood test, our family doctor called us recently to let us know that everything looked fine, but he was surprised to see several vitamin counts lower than he would have expected.
Turns out that Jughead (our online nickname for this particular child) has trouble processing certain nutrients including vitamins B and C, and while this isn't a huge concern it's definitely something we have to keep an eye on.
We were referred to a nutritionist, who went through our family diet, asked some very specific questions about Jughead, and then asked if we ate many raw foods in our family.
A bit taken aback we explained that no, we usually cook our chicken, potatoes, spaghetti etc.
- after all, doesn't everyone? Thankfully the nutritionist didn't laugh us out of her office, but instead explained that raw food referred to fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds and other plant based foods that were prepared in a way that didn't use heat.
It seems that the heat of the cooking process has a detrimental effect on certain vitamins, and that there's a way of preparing food that avoids this problem.
Well, we're not completely closed to new ideas (both my wife and I were vegetarians for a length of time back when we were in college) and certainly when it comes to the kids' health we're willing to try something unusual if necessary.
She gave us a reading list, and we began finding out more about raw food diets, and we quickly learned that a home food dehydrator is pretty much a must-have tool for for this style of eating.
We rather assumed that this was used simply for drying fruits and vegetables for snacks, but it turns out that there are hundreds of recipes available for food ranging from crackers and cookies through to casseroles, salads ...
even a type of pizza.
We bought ourselves a Nesco Gardenmaster home dehydrator, a model that several raw food experts recommend, and we've been experimenting for about a month now.
Some of the foods were an immediate success, including fruit leathers and dried banana chips; some are going to need a little more time before our whole family lets out a cheer as the serving dish is brought to the table (a "Sea Veggie Pizza" was particularly uninteresting to us).
But on the whole we've been very impressed with the new addition to our kitchen and to the new foods in our diets.
Jughead has found several foods that he enjoys a lot, and we plan to continue experimenting with our new home dehydrator.