Dehydrate Me Please!

Mr. Happy has a new obsession.   It's my fault... I told him to do it!  It all started with my desire to have edible trees and bushes.  We started with planting 2 apple trees and a plum tree when we moved in 5 years ago.  That grew to a salsa garden (Mr. Happy makes the BEST salsa) of tomatoes, onions, jalapenos and cilantro the following summer.  Then the next summer we added blackberry, blueberry and raspberry bushes, several strawberry plants and numerous rhubarb plants.  Now we have all that and an herb garden.  I guess I just love edible greenery and thankfully Mr. Happy can make it all grow (I have no green thumb... mine is orange - the dead shade of orange that signifies you don't have a green thumb!)!  Yes... all this in a very suburban neighborhood.  Can you imagine what I'd have done if we'd stayed in Northern (rural) Minnesota with acreage?  Mr. Happy'd be a farmer by now - overalls and all!  Though that image isn't quite as sexy as the lumberjack one I have for him - all burly, stubbly and flannel like... Okay, okay... back to the story... So far, the apple trees and plum tree have only yielded enough fruit for our family to enjoy each fall.  Until this year... the plum tree and Sweet Sixteen remained contained in a size fit for our family (*sob* if something was going to explode it should have been the Sweet Sixteen - I LOVE that apple variety).  The Haralson apple tree, however, exploded.  Like really, really exploded.  The top picture is with over half of it's harvest already plucked from branches.  Which leads to Mr. Happy's new obsession.  After a visit to Mills Fleet Farm (you can take the boy to the city, but you can't take the rural out of the boy...), Mr. Happy was talking dehydration and vacuum sealers.  So, I innocently said that I thought it was a great idea as we will not be able to eat all those apples before they start rotting and the kids LOVE dehydrated fruits.  Silly, silly me for thinking it would stop at apples.  So far, we have skin off apples pre-treated with lime, skin on apples, skin off apples pre-treated with Fresh Fruit Produce Protector with and without cinnamon added - and this is for about 1/3 of what we picked off the tree when we harvested it about 10 minutes after I took the picture above.  There are 5 boxes of apples still sitting in my garage (next to all the cub scout popcorn which is making it really hard to park in there... doesn't Mr. Happy understand that the garage is for my car?) waiting to be stored or dehydrated.  Even so... Mr. Happy moved onto dehydrating his herb garden (I believe he froze half and dehydrated half).  Then started the big stuff... rather than buy dehydrated meals in the pretty tin foil-esque packs from REI that just need boiling water added to produce a spectacular camping meal... Mr. Happy is making us dehydrated meals for our upcoming Boundary Waters trip.  Item one is Sweet and Sour Chicken which requires dehydration of cooked chicken, pineapple, various vegetables (peppers, onion and I'm not even sure what else - it was just tray after tray after tray of items being dehydrated) and the sweet and sour sauce; item two is chili which is dehydration of meat, beans (ummm... we are dehydrating already hydrated beans?), tomatoes, and the tomato paste.  (bottom picture is cinnamon apple rings, chicken, onion, orange and red peppers and the sweet and sour sauce)  Hoping it is as tasty as those ones be buy at REI or the kids may revolt!  I'd hate to deal with mutiny in a canoe as there really is nowhere for Mr. Happy to escape to! It did not end here though... the pièce de résistance is when he used my Pampered Chef Cookie Press to make jerky. That is the point when my eye began to twitch!  Sorry dear loved ones, I will not be sending cookies this year!  I will never be using my Pampered Chef Cookie Press again... but we will have jerky in pumpkin shapes and christmas tree shapes... JOY!  All griping aside about... a great by-product of this month's 'Mr. Happy obsession' is that our home continually smells like a home-cooked meal (of which we've had none since Football and Cross Country season started!)!  Not quite sure if the dehydrator has negative effects on us like a microwave does... but it does seem like my skin is dryer and my sinuses are suffering.  But then... I'm a total hypochondriac, so I could just be imagining it!