Care package for a sailor

Younger Daughter (who, as you remember, is in the Navy) is deployed once again. From her overseas duty station, she's now at sea for the next six months. Her internet is understandably spotty during this time – it gets worse the farther from shore they are – so we communicate when and how we can.

Life aboard a ship, I gather, obsessively centers on one thing: food. Frequently Younger Daughter is served "midrats" (midnight rations), meals provided for those who are working nights, and apparently the monotony and indifferent quality are a common complaint.

So a couple weeks ago she happened to see the blog post I put up about dehydrating broccoli and wistfully mentioned she would love some dehydrated broccoli. Younger Daughter is fond of a particular soup she used to make when she was a teenager consisting of noodles and various vegetables, and she thought she might be able to cobble together something similar with ramen noodles, a microwave, and boiling water – if only she had dried vegetables.

Well how can any mother resist that kind of cry for help? Next thing I knew, out came the dehydrators and I was trying my hand at drying a variety of new things.

First thing I did was list the vegetables I had canned up in the pantry. Of them, Younger Daughter especially craved corn. I have lots and lots of corn canned up, but I had never tried dehydrating canned corn. Time to experiment.

I started with seven pints...

...which I drained and rinsed.

I used the fine-mesh inserts on the trays.

I wasn't sure how many trays seven pints of corn would fill up, so I just kept spreading and stacking. Of the twelve possible trays (between two dehydrators), the corn filled eight.

Then I divvied them between the two machines, set them up outside (where the noise wouldn't drive us nuts), set the temperature at 125F, and let them run for eight hours.

It turned out better than I hoped.

Each kernel was golden and perfectly dry, yet somehow chewy (not hard like popcorn). The occasional dark kernel is from corn that was a bit above water-level in the jars when canned up. They're discolored, but otherwise fine.

I put the dried corn into a bowl...

...and turned my attention to another one of Younger Daughter's favorite veggies, cabbage.

Cabbage is certainly not something I'd ever tried dehydrating before, so this was unknown territory. The little instruction book that came with the dehydrator didn't even cover it. But a touch of online research suggested slicing the cabbage thin and drying it at 125F for eight hours.

So I peeled off the outer leaves...

...and sliced it thin.

I cut out the core, since the online source said it's too tough and dense to dry. Makes sense.

Four heads of cabbage filled two large bowls.

Those four heads also filled all twelve dehydrator trays full. In fact, I probably crowded the shredded cabbage on the trays a little thicker than I should have, but oh well.

I set the temp at 125F for four hours, rotated the trays, and set them for another four hours.

It turned out much better than I anticipated. I figured the cabbage would have dried down to thin threads of nothingness, but actually it turned out quite decent and with more substance than I expected. However a few pieces were still "damp," so I separated the majority of dried cabbage into a large bowl, and put the still-damp pieces into a smaller bowl.

I snipped these pieces smaller and spread them on a couple of trays for another hour of drying, which did the trick.

It's worth nothing that dehydrating cabbage makes no sense from an economic viewpoint, unless it's spread out in the sun and dried that way. The amount of electricity we used to run two dehydrators for a total of eight hour (or nine, depending on whether you count the extra drying time) far exceeds the cost of the cabbages. The biggest benefit is feeding a hungry sailor stuck out in the middle of the ocean.

After this it was easy to pull together everything else, since it was already dry. In the end I packed up cabbage, corn, broccoli, garlic, and onions. The corn, onions, and garlic came from our own garden, so it will be truly a taste of home.

I also slipped a box of tea into the care package (she requested tea bags, not loose leaf).

What the heck. There are worse things a kid could ask for than a box of dehydrated vegetables.

In only a few short weeks, this box will find its way to the middle of the ocean. Hopefully the veggies will relieve the tedium of midrats.