Farmington West Provident Living

The summer harvest season is upon us, which means it's time to begin preserving your favorite fruits and vegetables. Many foods can be dehydrated, including fruits, vegetables, nuts and meats. Drying foods is a great way to easily preserve food so it can be enjoyed all year long. Here are a few tips to help you begin processing your food by dehydration: Always use fresh produce.   Slice fruits and vegetables to about a half inch in thickness. For plums and apricots, slice in half and place them skin side down. This will make it much easier to remove them from the trays when they have finished drying.     Peel, core or remove pits/seeds before dehydrating peaches, pears and apples. Sweeteners can be added if desired, either by sprinkling it on the fruit after it's on the tray or by dipping fruit in a sweet liquid.   Set the dehydrator temperature, usually between 125 and 140. Turn the dehydrator on and check every 4 hours, until the fruit/veggies appear...

Paraffin wax is a waxy solid extracted from petroleum. Through a distillation process, solid paraffin wax becomes liquid paraffin, otherwise known as kerosene. Kerosene is a good source of energy for cooking and lighting. It is used as fuel in portable stoves and heaters.  Kerosene stoves and heaters are reliable and durable, and perform well under adverse conditions. An advantage of kerosene stoves over butane stoves is their particularly high thermal output and their ability to operate at very low temperature in winter or at high altitude. Kerosene(paraffin) is less flammable and volatile than gasoline.  A kerosene lantern with a one-inch wick will burn for 45 hours on 1 quart. The following amounts of kerosene would be used by burning a one-inch wick for 5 hours each day: 1/9 quart per day; 3 1/3 quarts per month; 10 gallons per year. Kerosene is one of the least expensive liquid fuels. It stores for long periods of time and can be used indoors with good ventil...

If you didn't make it to our "Cooking Without Power" class on Saturday, you missed out! We learned dozens of ways to cook when the power is out, and had a wonderful time tasting all of the delicious food we made! We started the class by learning about sun ovens, how to use them and all of the different types of food that can be made by simply harnessing the power of the sun! In just a little over an hour and a half, we made bread, orange rolls and even roasted a chicken with vegetables! Next, we fired up the apple box ovens. Apple box ovens use charcoal as a heat source. The foil-lined box acts as an insulator and reflects the heat, heating foods up to between 300-400 degrees! The foil-lined pan with charcoal goes underneath the apple box.  In the apple box ovens, we made pumpkin chocolate chip cookies and caramel apple cinnamon roll pie, but apple box ovens can be used to cook just about anything, including to make dutch oven cooking more effici...