Making chilli flakes in the dehydrator

With our frosty winter coming up, I'm not sure if my chilli plants will survive, and even if they do regrow in summer, I certainly won't be harvesting chillies over winter, so I decided to try to preserve some of the extra chillies that I have harvested this season.

chillis!

I used the solid tray in my dehydrator to dry chilli flakes. I just put 4 chillies in the blender (tops cut off and chillis cut in half, for some reason I made the mistake of putting my head over the blender and inhaling deeply to see what it smelled like, woo wee, not a good idea unless you need to clear your nostrils!), and scraped the resulting chopped chillies onto the tray (this is a very exciting success for the blender as I hate chopping chillis, you can never quite wash the hotness off your hands and then you have to be very careful where you put your fingers!). The flakes dried over a few days (with only a couple of hours of drier operation, my strategy is to run the drier when we're at home and leave the herbs/flakes etc in the drier for a few days to air dry naturally). I will keep making more as the chillies ripen and we will have chilli to use over winter.

More about drying herbs in the dehydrator here.

the flakes in the dehydrator

chilli flakes in the jar

Have you tried making chilli flakes? What do you make in your dehydrator?

The new Eight Acres website is live!

Very soon this blogspot address will automatically redirect to the new Eight Acres site, but in the meantime, you can check it out here . You will find all my soaps, ebooks and beeswax/honey products there, as well as the blog (needs a tidy up, but its all there!). I will be gradually updating all my social media links and updating and sharing blog posts over the next few months. I'm very excited to share this new website with you!

Chicken tractor guest post

Sign up for my weekly email updates here , you will find out more about chickens, soap and our farmlife, straight to your inbox, never miss a post! New soap website and shop opening soon.... Tanya from Lovely Greens invited me to write a guest post on chicken tractors for her blog. I can't believe how many page views I get for chicken tractors, they seem to be a real area of interest and I hope that the information on my blog has helped people. I find that when I use something everyday, I forget the details that other people may not be aware of, so in this post for Tanya, I tried to just write everything I could think of that I haven't covered in previous posts. I tried to explain everything we do and why, so that people in other locations and situations can figure out how best to use chicken tractors with their own chickens. The dogs like to hang out behind the chicken tractors and eat chicken poo. Dogs are gross! If you want to read more about chicken tractor

How to make soap with beer (and tallow)

I may have mentioned this before.... soap making is addictive! Once you start, you just want to keep making more soap. And not the same soap, you want to try all sorts of different soaps. I made the mistake of joining a facebook group called Saponification Nation and now my facebook newsfeed is full of glorious soaps, in all colours and shapes, which makes it even harder to resist the urge to experiment. One soap that kept popping up a few weeks ago was soap made with beer. I generally prefer not to use ingredients just for the sake of it, I like to know that they are adding something to the properties of the finished soap. As you know, I don't like to use artificial ingredients either (colours or fragrances). When I read about beer in soap I found out that beer adds sugar to the mixture, which increases lather. I use tallow in my soap, which has limited lather, so anything that adds lather could improve the soap. It also contributes a tan or brown colour to

Eight Acres

Search This Blog