The UFO Has Launched
This morning I woke up with a migraine. What a perfect time to break out the UFO food dehydrator. All I had to do was cut up the sweet potato I bought yesterday, stick the wedges on the racks, start the food dehydrator, and walk away. Our spoiled four-legged children could enjoy the sweet potato treats I haven't been able to find in Wyoming, and I could pretend to be useful. A win for everybody.
My first hurdle was blanching the sweet potato slices first. Blanch is not a word I remembered from my cooking class when I was 13 years old. (I should have taken wood shop instead - I would probably know just as much about cooking, plus I might finish the class with a chessboard or a chair instead of a kitchen phobia.)
After some internet research, I discovered I could blanch the sweet potatoes in the microwave. I pulled out our microwave steamer, only to discover that there was no obvious way to fit all the pieces together. The instructions were on the box my husband threw away. Puzzles are not recommended with migraines, but I finally figured out how to stack the pieces without them collapsing on each other. All that was left to do was stick the steamer in the microwave and guesstimate how long to blanch the sweet potatoes (without cooking them) at altitude.
Small does not begin to describe the microwave that came with the house - it would be perfect if we lived in a closet. It also sits on a shelf that is about the height of my forehead. Not only did I have to carefully balance the steamer so that it wouldn't unstack and deposit the contents on the stove, the steamer barely fit in our microwave. But enthusiasm (or persistence) won, and so did my estimate of how to long to microwave the sweet potato slices.
The next hurdle was taking the UFO apart so that I could put the sweet potato slices on the racks. It took some fussing to remove the brackets that held the racks in place.
The good news was that I found the instruction book under the last rack. So the book wasn't missing after all, it was just hidden and hard to get to. Why did I expect the instructions to be floating around in the box where I could read them before I started?
The bad news was that the instructions didn't say whether to put the brackets back on before starting the UFO, so I didn't. If the racks flew around the kitchen during dehydration, oops.
The last hurdle was figuring out where to put the food dehydrator. We have two kitchen counters, and neither are large. The food dehydrator takes up about a third of one counter. So where to put all the stuff that has collected on the counters (vitamins, pet pills, containers of spatulas and the like) and still keep the coffee maker plugged in? After some creative rearranging, I cleared a space on one counter, plugged in the UFO, crossed my fingers, and flicked the switch.
According to the instructions, it would take 6-10 hours to dehydrate the sweet potatoes. I split the difference and set our kitchen timer for 8 hours. The sound of the blower (which we had the pleasure of listening to all day) reminded me of my mother's old portable hair dryer, the kind with the plastic tubing that came out of a box and attached to a cap that inflated like your brain was exploding.
Nine hours later, the sweet potato slices were done to perfection, and our spoiled children lived up to their reputations as dancing dogs. There were no explosions or flying racks, so in spite of a rough start, the UFO launch was a success!
