ode to a dehydrator

I was in someone else's kitchen, washing dishes. Not just dishes - also all possible hardware designed for the purpose of turning dead animals into dinner table delicacies. Not the greatest fun, and a remarkably good place to discover that I had some distance to go in the cultivation of a generous & non-judgemental heart...

My hosts were accepting (mostly) of my fruitarian ways, but I found that I was reluctant to prepare my fresh fruit meals among the blood splatters. So for a while I survived - very happily - on my dehydrated fruit. Home-made and taken along on the trip as a sort of experiment, to see how well things lasted without refrigeration. It was a huge success, and I am now a committed dehydrator - if you know what I mean.

My current favourite - persimmon. The overflow from my brave & generous little tree turned into delicate discs of translucent amber, light as air, intensely flavoured. I should post a picture of it here, but I ate it all. Perhaps from the next batch.

Highly recommended therefore: EZIDRI dehydrator. And don't mess around - get the big one which can stack up to 30 trays - you buy it with the initial 5 trays, but you'll soon be ordering extra trays as you discover how useful & effortless the whole process is.

This is where you find the SA distributors.

And herewith my thanks to Alison from Tierhoek Organics - this generous, lovely lady who said to me: "But you should do your own dehydrating... this is what you do..."

This was at the Organic Expo in Cape Town - I wanted to buy some of Tierhoek's excellent dehydrated products, and Alison did the noble thing, and looked beyond her own profits, and advised me to MY best advantage.

A toast therefore, to the lovely Alison of Tierhoek Organics, and to those good Ezidri people who made it possible for this fruitarian to ALWAYS (whether in the bush, on a long expedition, or indeed in meat-eating territory) be able to eat a variety of excellent, organic, non-preserved fruit, without being troubled by considerations of weight (try carrying a bag of oranges up a mountain...) or refrigeration.