I told you last week that I would actually cook something with the dehydrated veggies I've been making. So, I made a chicken pot pie, just for you (and Mike and me).  First I boiled the dehydrated veggies in chicken broth for 30 minutes, then added a little flour to thicken and chopped chicken.  

 While that was cooling off, Mike came by and added salt, pepper and garlic and I made the pie crust.

 I put the filling in the bottom crust and covered with a top crust.  Several slits were added to vent the steam.

 The pie was cooked for 40 minutes at 400 degrees.  Isn't it pretty?

 I know, that's all well and good, but what does it taste like?  To be honest, it was not a Swanson or Marie Calendar.  But it was not bad - could have used more spices, though.  Next time, we'll kick it up a notch - the crust was the best part.

However......you can buy frozen pot pies any day of the week at a grocery store.  But what if the grocery store is closed due to a hurricane or other emergency?  Yep, you'll be standing in the food hand out line and I'll be at home cooking hot chicken pot pie.  

I'm on a new tangent with my dehydrator.  After watching the devastation from Hurricane Sandy and all the people without electricity or food or gas - I was even more paranoid about food storage.  I took my little insecure self into my pantry to take inventory and realized that I was a little short in the veggie department.  Not only that, jars and cans of veggies are really heavy!  I went to a website that sells freeze dried  and dehydrated food and they're really proud of that stuff.  I don't happen to have an extra $700- $3000 to spare at the moment.
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So, I decided to do it myself.  Check out dehydrate2store.com.  That woman has a great website and lots of videos.  Kroger's has their frozen vegetables on sale so I loaded up.  (oh yeah, you can dehydrate fresh or frozen).

Here's my first example:  Vegetable soup mix.  (fine, go ahead and read the fine print - I didn't buy all the same thing - big deal!)  There's corn, peas, green beans, potatoes, carrots, okra and potatoes.  There are 12 oz in each bag, (I use 5 bags at a time in  the dehydrator)   which equates to 7 and 1/2 cups of veggies.  After they've spent 12 hours in my dehydrator, it's only 4 cups.

Yes, it does look like little shriveled pieces of .....stuff.  But add boiling water and let it sit for 20 minutes and they rehydrate right back to their original size - I tested it.

This is a quart jar which holds 4 cups of dehydrated veggies.  Next step is to vacuum seal - well, the jar is heavy!  If hurricane flood waters are coming and you want to leave with food, wouldn't you rather carry a bag instead of a jar??

A quick run through the vacuum sealer.  Don't forget to add an oxygen absorber in the bag.  You can buy them online.

There you are - 4 cups vacuum sealed that takes up the space of one bag of frozen vegetables.  Next week I'll cook chicken pot pie and let you know how that works out.

You didn't think I was going to stop with just one example, did you?  Oh no, no, no!   I've done green beans, peas, corn, carrots, sweet potatoes and banana chips.  Each of the bags in the picture above contains 7 1/2 cups of frozen veggies dehydrated down to 4 cups.  My poor dehydrator is running 24 hours a day.