I got a food dehydrator from a secondhand shop just before Christmas. It didn’t have an instruction book with it so I looked it up online. It’s a Hydraflow Ezidri Snackmaker. Hillmark is the company which sell them now. I tried mine out last night. I made dried apple and banana. They taste nothing like the shop bought ones. I wanted dried fruit without the sulphur dioxide which is used as a preservative. Dried fruit from health food shops without sulphur dioxide is extremely expensive (also I couldn’t get any where I live) so doing it myself is a tremendous cost saving. Dehydrated food retains 95% of its nutritional value too.

I’ve found out from the Hillmark website that I can also make corn or potato chips, health bars, fruit leather, dried tomatoes, flowers, herbs.

I can’t wait til my tomatoes are ripe and then I can dry the excess and give them away! If I’d had this early enough before Christmas I would’ve made Christmas presents of dried fruit and veg.

It takes between 8 and 12 hours for foods to dry enough to be safely preserved. Last night I put the apples and bananas in before I went to bed and they were ready when I got up this morning.

Looking forward to making more of my own yummy treats!

The “gifts” I bought for my family from the World’s Most Useful Gift Catalogue have gone down very well so far this year! I’m seeing more of my family today for another Christmas celebration so I’ll see what the reaction is today too 🙂

Lisa, who commented on my last
post about this told me that World Vision also has a similar gift catalogue called Smiles.

I’ve been so busy I haven’t written any blog posts lately.

Nearly all my Christmas presents are done and I’ve made some cards too.

At work (Teen Challenge) this is probably our busyest time of the year. We’re giving out Christmas food hampers to anyone who needs some help at Christmas. Next week we also have a week of special Christmas lunches instead of the regular basic lunches we do. There will be presents for all the children too 🙂

I’ve been to a few Christmas breakups and lunches. For all my T.C. staff I designed ‘special’ staff awards for everyone which I presented at our Christmas lunch. It was a lot of fun and everyone took them in the spirit they were intended. A patron at another table came over and said that we should receive an award for the group with the most awards. I was a bit embarassed that we were drawing attention from the other diners.

Doug has finished his CFS training and has been to Waikerie (South Australia) a couple of times to help with fighting the bushfire there.

Jessica’s interest in MySpace.com has pretty much worn off. I knew if I stopped her from using it altogether she’d rebel but allowing her to use it with some restrictions she’s got it out of her system now.

I’ ve been running Jess to a local hairdressing salon for some work experience. She’s made such an impression that they keep asking her to come in and work and want her there on a regular basis. It’s good for her but a bit hectic for me. Today she walked to the salon and got a lift home which was good.

A friend of mine recently purchased a secondhand computer with Windows Vista installed on it. Thankfully they knew that this was a beta, evaluation version of the software. They were able to remove it and install something else.

Can you imagine, though a total newbie buying a secondhand computer with Vista on it thinking that they’re getting the completed, latest version of the Windows operating system. They’ll get a shock when someone tells them what they’ve actually got.

I’ve also had an elderly couple (clients of mine) who bought a secondhand computer with Win XP on it but didn’t get the OS cd with it. Now that their pc is experiencing problems they don’t have XP to reinstall.

Tear Australia have a gift catalogue called The World’s Most Useful Gift Catalogue. I’ve purchased things like Eye Care and School Supplies. I’ll get cards to give to my family which describe what the gift is and places for me to write their names. The money goes to Tear to provide these services.

I think this is a teriffic idea. I’ve really struggled with what to give this year, we don’t need more ‘stuff’ to junk up our houses or later fill landfill.

Here’s a quote from the Tear website, “Have you ever felt uncomfortable about having so much, when others have so little? Ever felt embarrassed about giving, or receiving a gift, when others go without?”

This isn’t an ad for Tear, I’m just happy to have found a solution to gift giving this year 🙂 and thought others might like to know about it.

Apologies to anywhere there’s an RSS feed of my blog. I’ve just updated to Blogger beta and it re-sent the last 25 or so of my blog posts. Most boring and annoying to everyone.

I don’t know if this has happened to anyone else? If you were thinking of updating your blogger blog you might want to wait a bit and see if this happens to others.