When you've bought too much fruit or just didn't get to eat it before it became over-ripe what do you do with it? Throw it away? Plug your nose and choke it down? Feed it to the dog?
Well, I really don't like to waste food, but sometimes you can't help it when your bananas turn brown before you've had a chance to eat them all. It happens! Sometimes you forget about that bag of grapes in the back of the fruit bin of your fridge. And sometimes the kiwis shrivel up waiting to be eaten because no one feels like going through the pain-staking task of removing the skin.
So what do you do with your over-ripe fruit?
If it's a berry, I usually put it in a bag and freeze it for smoothies. The flavor is still there- it's the texture that has changed that is undetectable when blended. Perfect!
If it's a banana, well most of the time I freeze it for my award-winning banana bread recipe that calls for over-ripened frozen bananas. Score!
For every other fruit (and bananas too, on occasion) I will dehydrate it. My dehydrator is one of the coolest kitchen tools I have. It helps me to make a lot of fun foods, including healthy, dried fruits that my kids and I just gobble up!
The other day, I realized that we had WAY to many grapes in the house and they were all starting to get soft. I had just bought a bag the same day Greg did, and we already had some! Yikes! I really dislike soft grapes, so we decided to bust out the dehydrator and make raisins.
While we had the dehydrator out, I decided to slice up some browning bananas out that I considered throwing in the freezer.
I also put in some kiwi that we hadn't gotten around to eating that had started to shrivel.
Oh, and I threw in a few apples just for Aria- just because. Twelve hours later, this is what we had! Yum! It was gone in an hour! Of course the raisins took much longer (about 3 days) but they're worth it! We have a huge bowl of the plumpest, juiciest raisins you've ever seen! Now to find a recipe to use those in! Oh- the fun never ends!
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