Zucchini Chips

Zucchini chips:

Peel and gut the zucchini and chop it into chip sizes. I cheated and used the fine slicing blade on our Kitchen Aide food processor.

Sprinkle generously with a flavor of your choice - we tried white cheddar and Parmesan popcorn flavors and Splenda/cinnamon and that was what we like best. The dried chips seemed to have a slightly sweet natural flavor that went better with the cinnamon.

 

Don't be shy about putting on the flavorings. The moisture in the zucchini dissolves the flavorings and prevents the fan from blowing off the spices.  It takes about 10 hours at 125 deg F.

So they probably aren't cheeto's, but then they have almost no calories either.

Hot Water Heater Safety Valve Maintenance or Blow Up Your Home.......

Here is a great little tutorial on maintaining your hot water heater relief valve:




Now of course if that is too much trouble......:




or.....:





Aren't these all great videos?  Amazing what an exploding water heater can do.

Get Ready, Get Set.......Garden

We have a lot of snow on the ground right now, and I think that more is coming.  But I can't help but feel good about spring. 

The garden books have been coming fairly regularly, and even worse, the baby chick catalogs.  I'm not really thinking of getting any chicks yet, but I know that it is about time to get ready to plant the early garden.

I was just in a planning meeting for our coming spring outage.  We will be totally concentrated on the outage work from about March 16 until the end of April.  So I know I only have about 6 weeks to get in the cool weather crops.  If I don't get them in before the outage, they will still grow, but it will get hot, and they won't really like it.

What to plant for the early garden?  You can plant these crops as early as you can turn the soil.  It doesn't matter if there is still some frost in it.

• Lettuce
• Arugula
• Peas, both garden and snow
• Onions, both seed or sets
• Carrots 
• Beets
• Swiss Chard

I think you could also plant 

• Cabbage
• Kale
• Turnips
• Broccoli
• Cauliflower
• Celery
• Potatoes

I'm a little nervous about the potatoes that early, but I think the rest of them would be OK.  The thing is, the seeds won't germinate until the soil warms up, and then when the little plants come up, they are already pretty used to the outdoors and are tougher then if you got them from a green house and transplanted them (think broccoli, cauliflower,  and cabbage).  I'm sure that you could get a hard enough cold snap late in the spring to kill them, but they are pretty tough.  Not like apricot blossoms or tomatoes.


Anyway, this is just a little reminder to my Nearest and Dearest.  I like to buy my seed from Mountain Valley Seeds.  They come in a foil pouch, and are resealable, and you can buy in quantity at a reasonable price.  Happy digging!

Home Made Batteries

Here is a fun little video on how to make batteries from pennies, cardboard and vinegar, or pennies, washers, cardboard and vinegar.  Oh, and of course, electrical tape.  Seriously this could be a handy thing if you badly needed a battery.  It's probably  a lot easier to keep some extra batteries around the house, but this was pretty impressive anyway.




This guy has a lot of interesting things on his site.  This project reminded me of Phoebe's brother melting things....  :)






this: