Veggie Chippers

With Saturday's grocery shopping out of the way and a few hours to call my own on Sunday after church, I decided to tackle my first dehydrating recipe, Zucchini Chips.

My new Japanese Mandolin Benriner worked like a dream and felt much more safe than the other ones I have used in the past. Didn't get bit by the blade and the zucchini slices were delicately thin and perfect. Trysten even got into the action by helping place the marinated zucchini slices (olive oil, sea salt & pepper) on the plastic lattice racks of the the circular dehydrator. My son, who loves all things round, was disappointed to find that no actual rotation motion was involved in dehydrating. We set the temperature and plugged it in and let it run for 16-20 hours. Easy. That was all I had time for yesterday.

At 6:30am this morning my crisp little zucchini chips were ready for tasting and I was pleased that Trysten was open-minded enough to try them. Nice crunch, but frankly, the zucchini chips tasted yucky. I didn't even like them. I put them in a ziploc bag and brought them to work and a few people really liked the taste which was kind of bitter. I also observed that the oil that I had marinated them was pooling at the bottom of the bag. Too greasy for my liking. I made a note to 1/2 the olive oil in my other vegetable chip recipes. In the end my co-worker, who genuinely enjoyed them, got the whole loot to take home. Did I mention that 3 whole zucchinis were reduced to less than two cups of vegetable chips? Shrinkage to the max!

This got me thinking. I don't really like zucchini all that much anyway. I don't mind it freshly sauteed in a tomato-based sauce or in a vegetable soup but I've never enjoyed zucchini on it's own. Maybe this wasn't the best forum for this vegetable since dehydrating tends to minimize size but maximize flavour and the best thing about zucchini is that it doesn't have much taste!

Not daunted by zucchini failure, I made sure to prepare sweet potato chips and had the dehydrator humming before leaving for work. I halved the oil this time. We've done a few taste tests this evening and the sweet potato chips look like a winner-even by Trysten's standards. The chili powder and Bragg's soy sauce help, but the sweet mild flavour of the sweet potato is pleasant on its own. I didn't time this recipe very well because they will be finished at 2am. Guess I'll be setting the alarm clock for this one!

In the end, if I find a couple vegetable that the kids will tolerate, it will be a nice snack option for those days where I'm after my family to pack a vegetable in their lunch and there is nothing available fresh. Let's not forget those valuable digestive enzymes!