Do You Want a Good Cry?

If you like to cry, come on over. My house is the house of onions right now. The air is enough to bring tears to your eyes. Every year I like to dehydrate certain vegetables. I did a whole post on dehydrators here. In this post I told about how I love to dehydrate Vidalia onions. I am not a good onion grower. I am trying again this year though, so we shall see. We LOVE Vidalias and use them often as long as they are available. To be able to still have some around for later use, dehydrating works for us. You can get approximately 50 lbs. of Vidalias in a 1/2 gallon jar when you are done.

Here are the onions. I like to get them on sale and then buy a large amount. I peel them and get them ready for slicing. I save all my onion skins for my compost.

We had been wanting a meat/cheese slicer, but did not want to pay what they cost. We buy our raw milk cheddar in 5 to 6 lb. blocks. If we make our own cheese it is in a large round. Also, we cook our own meats for lunch meat. It would be nice to have something that would slice it all down for us. This spring I saw this slicer at a garage sale for $10. I wasn't sure about buying it, but my sweet man went back to look at it and bought it. I thought I would give it a try with onions. I do have another slicer that is not electric, but sometimes, the onions are too fat to use it, unless you cut them down some.

I put a big onion on this end, turned it on and started going back and forth.

I got a lovely pile of pretty uniform slices out this side!! I was thrilled.

Here they are on the dehydrator trays.

Here is the dehydrator that I have. It has a total of 10 trays, but I only used 9 of them today. Every once in awhile, I will go take 2 trays from the bottom and move them to the top, just to keep them rotated.

I will take more pictures when they are done and what they look like after I run them through the blender or the food processor.