Road Trip Snacks Part 3: Banana Chips

Chris & I have practically a freezer full of once-mushy brown bananas.  We do a lot better nowadays than we once did, but still sometimes a few ripe bananas slip past the lovely yellow & delicious stage into the more-brown-than-yellow stage of ripeness.  At that point, Chris tends to ignore them and I eventually throw them into the freezer.

Side note: if you freeze the bananas whole with skin-on, then when you're ready to use them, just pop them in a bowl of hot water for about 30 seconds, and the skin will slip off easily!  Then you can either use the rest of the frozen banana immediately in an ice-cold smoothie, or continue defrosting it for baking.

Anyway, I've promised Chris that I wouldn't be adding any more unfortunate brown bananas to our frozen stash, so I had to come up with another overripe banana solution.  This particular night, our oven was already in use roasting our peanuts, so baking anything was pretty much ruled out.  How about homemade banana chips?!

I had made banana chips one time before using a recipe I found online, and they took FOREVER.  It was a delicious concoction involving a honey-cardamom glaze or something like that, but news flash -- when you add a glaze to food that you're going to dehydrate, it makes it take about 400 times longer!

So I just went super simple on these banana chips.

You'll need:

• Bananas
• Nutmeg or cinnamon, if desired
• Knife or mandoline
• A food dehydrator 

Step 1: Slice the bananas

Try to achieve even thin slices, about 1/8" thick.  The thicker the slices, the longer they'll take in the dehydrator.  I just used a knife, but a mandoline would be excellent if you're a perfectionist.

Step 2: Arrange slices on the racks

Spread your banana slices in a single layer on the racks of the food dehydrator, making sure they don't overlap.  Our 4 bananas took up almost 2 racks.  They do shrink as they cook.

Step 3: Add seasonings, if desired

Your banana chips are going to be sweet, so you don't need to add any sugar!  We added nutmeg to half of the bananas and left the other half plain.

Step 4: Dehydrate and Wait

Set your dehydrator to 135ºF and run it until the chips are crisp and completely dry.  They'll look a bit shriveled but shouldn't be chewy.  Cooking time will depend on your dehydrator's settings, but it should take between 4-8 hours.

Check the chips periodically by munching on one -- if it's crunchy, you're done -- if not, just put the lid back on and check again in about an hour.

We made both kale and banana chips at the same time and they didn't absorb each others' flavors at all so you can definitely combine multiple dehydration projects at one time!

Step 5: Yum!

Once they're done, turn off the dehydrator and let the chips cool completely before packing them.  These banana chips will keep in an air tight container for up to a week, but we planned to eat them pretty much immediately!

If you care about discoloration of the bananas (like if you're saving them for longer storage), I've read you can soak the banana slices in citric acid or lemon juice back at the beginning, but again this will add to the amount of time needed for fully dehydrating.

Chris preferred the plain banana chips & I preferred the ones with the light dusting of nutmeg.  They were a perfect sweet snack for keeping us awake on a few late nights of driving!

Road Trip Snacks Part 2: Kale Chips

Chris & I planted a row of curly kale back in August that we knew we probably wouldn't get to harvest much of before moving.  We cut a couple of large bunches by the end of November and it looked nice and hearty for the next community gardener coming into our old garden plot.  Bea thought she had finished using up all our kale but found some leftovers during project clean-out-the-fridge.  It still looked pretty good, so we made a batch of kale chips for our roadtrip!  This recipe was adapted from the Kitchn's “Snack Recipe: Cheesy Yet Vegan Kale Chips".

You'll need:

• 3/4 cup cashews
• 1 bunch kale, with stems removed
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled
• 1 tablespoon Bragg's Liquid Aminos
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1/3 cup nutritional yeast
• 2 tablespoons of lemon juice
• A food dehydrator (preferred method)
• A small food processor

Step 1: Soak the cashews

Cover the cashews with water and let them soak for at least an hour.

Step 2: Chop the kale

While cashews are soaking, remove the stems from the kale, and chop the leaves into bite-sized pieces.  The kale will shrink as it dehydrates so cut it a bit bigger than you want the final chips to be.

Step 3: Make the sauce

Add the garlic, Braggs, oil, and nutritional yeast to a food processor.  Give it a few quick spins, enough to chop the garlic and combine the ingredients into a sauce.  After an hour of soaking, drain the cashews and add them to the food processor.  Run the processor until the cashews are ground into a slightly liquid paste and thoroughly combined with the rest of the sauce.  Add more lemon juice a teaspoon at a time if you need to thin it out -- it should be like a thick salad dressing.

Step 4: Combine

In a large bowl, combine kale and cashew sauce, making sure the kale is evenly coated.  (If you're impatient, this makes a great raw salad if you want to eat it right now!)

Step 5: Dehydrate

Place kale pieces on the racks of your food dehydrator, allowing a little space between pieces so they don't overlap.  Use multiple racks if needed -- ours took up 4 racks.  Set the dehydrator for 135ºF and run it until the chips are crisp and completely dry -- cooking time will depend on your dehydrator's settings, but it should take between 2-4 hours.

If you don't have a food dehydrator, you can set your oven for the lowest setting (like WARM not bake).  Depending on your oven, you may possibly even need to prop the door open to keep the heat as low as possible.  The goal is really to keep these chips as “raw" as possible by NOT cooking them, so you need the heat below 150ºF for sure and lower if you can get it to work in a conventional oven.  The cooking time will vary based on the temperature you can achieve, but check very regularly so they don't turn into ash!

When using a dehydrator, the risk of overcooking is diminished so you just need to check on the chips periodically -- taste one for done-ness about every hour or so.  When they're light and crunchy, they're ready to eat!

These kale chips will keep in an air tight container for up to a week, but if 2 people have the container sitting between them, the chips will disappear very quickly!

Road Trip Snacks Part 1: Roasted Peanuts

If there's one form of vacation we Fixettwells take over and over, it's the “visit as much of the 2/3rds of the eastern USA as possible in one week-long road trip" variety.  So for Christmas 2013, we bought a cheap used cargo van and set off on an adVANture!

Being budget-conscious, Bea spent the week before we left town planning our menu around eating up all the perishables in our fridge.  When we weren't quite able to finish everything, she decided to spend the night before we left in the kitchen, whipping up roadworthy snacks!  These all turned out to be delicious, but we definitely recommend starting this snack-making project before 10pm and finishing before 4:30am of the day you're supposed to leave!

This post is in 3 parts:
     Roasted Peanuts (keep reading)
     Kale Chips
     Banana Chips

Roasted Peanuts!

We grew peanuts in one bed of our garden this year -- we had pretty poor germination rates and so our resulting peanut harvest was pretty pathetically small.  Peanuts are legumes and so they help add nitrogen to your soil, but they have a pretty long growing season (100-130 frost-free days, depending on the variety) so you have to be willing to devote them the growing space for basically the entire season.  In Washington, DC where we grew ours, you plant them a few weeks after the last frost (we put ours in around Memorial Day) and then you dig them up when the plants turn yellow in the fall -- before the first frost.

Each plant produces a cluster of peanuts but unless you devote a whole lot of space to peanut production, this is going to be a novelty crop for home or community gardeners.  For instance, it takes over 500 peanuts to produce a 12-ounce jar of peanut butter!  So to us, roasting them whole makes more sense.

Unfortunately, we dug up our peanuts right before making our Month-Long Move so stowed them in a bag in the fridge “to deal with later".  This is definitely not recommended as Best Practices for Roasted Peanuts!  Turns out it's better to hang the entire plant to dry for about a month.  However, even with our limited harvest & rocky harvesting procedure, the resulting snack is pretty tasty, and next year we vow to do even better!

We found some basic instructions on roasting peanuts on WikiHow -- and modified slightly since we had garden-fresh raw peanuts.

Step 1: Clean the peanuts

Our peanuts still had mud and dirt on them, plus the runner stems and unfortunately also a little mold.  Wash everything in cold water and compost anything that's severely discolored, mushy, or moldy.



We made 3 piles: compost, shellable, and unshelled.  The shellable were ones with minor discoloration that still felt firm and edible but wouldn't be pretty as-is -- but just remove the shells and voila, they look much more presentable!  For our unshelled peanuts we chose just those that had survived their being ignored for too long & still looked good after a thorough washing.

Step 2: Dry the peanuts

Spread them out and pat them dry with a towel.

Step 3: Preheat the oven

Set it for 350ºF

Step 4: Put peanuts on a baking sheet

Make sure they fit on only one layer -- they don't shrink as they roast so use multiple baking sheets if needed.  Also if you're doing some shelled and some unshelled, use multiple sheets since the cooking time differs.  If you're worried about discoloring your cookie sheets, use parchment paper or tin foil under the peanuts.

Step 5: Place in the center of the oven

Step 6: Check and turn the nuts occasionally

We used a spatula to move the peanuts around to make sure they got roasted on all sides.  This step seemed more important for the shelled peanuts.  To check the unshelled nuts for done-ness, we opened and ate one at a time every 5 minutes or so.  The cooking time indicated on our recipe was 15-20 minutes for unshelled and 20-25 minutes for shelled peanuts -- however, we found that it actually took more than half an hour until our peanuts were roasty and tasty, but your mileage may vary.  When our kitchen started smelling like roasted peanuts, that was when they actually tasted done to us so you could use this as an indicator.

Step 7: Remove from the oven & cool

We made sure to cool the peanuts completely before pouring them into jars so that we didn't have to deal with moisture buildup or potential mold.  Double check to make sure that they're completely cool before putting the lids on the jars!

Step 8: Salt if desired

Our peanuts tasted pretty good unsalted so we left them plain, but you could add salt if you want.  Some recipes call for soaking the unshelled peanuts for multiple hours before roasting, but we didn't have time for all that since we did this so late at night.  They turned out yummy anyway!

Enjoy!