Meet my new best friend.  A dehydrator with a plastic fruit-roll up tray!

 Let’s experiment with a few things.  Do you remember during hurricane Ike, when the grocery stores were empty?  And you couldn’t get bread, meat, milk, eggs, or WATER?  Well, I can’t help you with the water, but let’s take a look at eggs.  I saw in a catalog where you could buy dried eggs in a can to store in case of emergencies – but I was too cheap to spend that much money.  But, during Easter, Kroger had eggs on sale for 88 cents a dozen – so I bought 4 dozen to experiment with.

1) After dinner, scramble 6 eggs in a bowl and 2) pour into the fruit roll-up tray of the dehydrator.  Set the temp setting on 145 degrees and go to bed.  3)  the next morning your tray will look like a sheet of corn flakes  4)  put the dried eggs in the blender to make a powder and 5) place in a glass jar with a tight fitting lid.

I know what you’re saying….”that’s just nasty.”  But hold on, let’s put it to a taste test!  I took a blueberry muffin mix and divided it into 3 parts - one third for the real egg, one third for the dehydrated egg and just because I wonder what people really put in muffin mixes, I decided to use one third with NO eggs.   For one egg, take a rounded tablespoon of dried egg power and add 3 tablespoons of water.   Beat with a fork and let sit for 10 minutes.  Beat again.  Mix all bowls of your muffin mix according to directions.  Place each batch into different colored muffin papers to distinguish them apart.

Here are the results.  

OK, let’s be honest.  On a scale of 1 to 10, the real egg is a 10, but the dried egg is an 8.  We don't even need to talk about the no egg muffins on the right - they were truly disgusting.  The real egg muffins browned better and looked prettier, but the taste was really close.  If you don’t have any eggs in the house during an emergency situation – you can still make hot, fluffy, blueberry muffins.  (my experiment assumes you keep muffin mix stored in your pantry – I’m just saying).  Next time, we’ll test scrambled dehydrated eggs!  Who’s coming over for dinner??