Tammy Gangloff - Quick and Easy Dehydrated Meals in a Bag

Thank you all for reading along with us as we dove deep into the exploration of many fun food dehydration and storage marvels. We walked you through the basics of meal storage, taught you about our pour-and-go slow-cooker meals, and gave you a vibrant cornucopia of meals, desserts, and snacks in a bag! We hope you have learned and laughed with us, and tasted many new things. Further, we hope this book has changed the way you prepare food for yourself and your family, to put more money back in your pocket and more free time on your calendar. Oh! Soups ready! Your Guides, Tammy, Steve, and September Published by Stackpole Books An imprint of Globe Pequot Trade Division of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK Copyright 2018 by Tammy Gangloff, Steven Gangloff, MD, and September Ferguson Photos by KC Kratt Photography All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gangloff, Tammy, author. | Gangloff, Steven, author. | Ferguson, September, author. Title: Quick & easy dehydrated meals in a bag / Tammy Gangloff, Steven Gangloff, and September Ferguson. Other titles: Dehydrated meals in a bag | Quick and easy dehydrated meals in a bag Description: Guilford, CT : Stackpole Books, [2018] | Includes index. | FoodDrying. | Lunchbox cooking. | LCGFT: Cookbooks. | LCGFT: Cookbooks.

Classification: LCC TX609 (ebook) | LCC TX609 .G348 2018 (print) | DDC 641.4/4dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034440 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

I would like to dedicate this book to all the people who have written to us and posted requests and encouragement to compose a book specifically on packing meals in a bag. It was your loving support of our work in dehydrating that has made this book possible. I cannot thank you enough for all the love and kind words. Special thanks To my amazing hard-working children who are also my coauthors,
September Ferguson and Dr. Steven Gangloff.

To my loving and kind son Scott Gangloff and my son-in-law Steve Ferguson,
thank you for all of your support. To my incredibly sweet and adorable grandchildren
Kaylee, Brayden, Parker, and Finn... I love you! To our publisher. To KC Kratt Photography. To Kevin Telaak of Artisan Kitchen and Bath for allowing us to use one of his beautiful kitchens (cover photo). Tammy

Weve all done it: paid for the easy accessibility of store-bought meals in a box.

You know what were talking about! Walk down any grocery aisle and you will find boxes of easy meals or side dishes. The main work has been done, all the seasonings and spices are there; just add a few ingredients and youre ready in minutes. Whether youre a stay-at-home mom or dad, a working parent, or a caregiver of any kind, life is crazy busy. We get it! We spend much of our lives running around between jobs, hobbies, and errands, shuttling the kids from place to place, all the while harboring that nagging question in the backs of our minds: What am I making for dinner tonight? Often, we make what is fast and easy. But for this, we have to compromise. We pay extra money to purchase the pre-boxed meal, and we pay the health cost on these often over-processed and sodium- saturated items.

Its about time we share with you our secret to making easy, healthy, and cost-effective meals in a snap, using your own ingredients, ready at your fingertips. Dont fall out of your chair yetwere just getting to the good part! Our first book, The Ultimate Dehydrator Cookbook , showed you the art of food dehydration, preparation, and rehydration. We got you started with instructions on dehydrating foods from A to Z, and introduced you to rehydrating and making meals, desserts, and treats. In this book we will take you into a new realm of ingenuity as we tackle making meals in a bag with your dehydrated fruits and veggies. Now, what exactly is a meal in a bag? Its the convenience of store-bought pre-prepared meals, without the compromise to your bank account and your health. Its the freedom to go beyond Turkey Pieces and Gravy and to create your own family-loved recipes; delicious, healthy, pre-prepared, pre-packaged, and ready to enjoy.

Why make meals in a bag? As hinted above, there are many benefits. A single-serving boxed meal will cost you a few dollars, or even close to ten dollars for a quality lean or fit version. Extrapolate that for your entire family, and you can see how much you are paying for convenience. With dehydrated foods you can purchase fresh items in bulk and in larger quantities, and store for years without the use of the electricity or the fear of freezer burn, and with less food waste. You can make a single bag meal containing the serving size needed for your whole family, saving on packaging cost and environmental impact. You will find your weekly grocery bill shrinking like a carrot in your dehydrator.

Important, too, are the health benefits of this venture. Try the flip game with your family next time you walk down your local grocers frozen meal aisle. Try to guess the amount of preservatives in a meal, flip it over, and see if you were close. You will be shocked. A single one-cup serving of a popular brand of frozen lasagna contains 810 mg of sodium. Depending on your appetite, it is not hard to imagine consuming 1,620 to 2,430 mg of sodium in a single meal even if you drink water and skip dessert.

The FDA recommends that adults limit their sodium intake to less than 2,300 mg per entire day . A high-sodium diet is well recognized in the medical community as having a direct impact on blood pressure, a consequence that causes many long-term health problems. This is just sodium. Imagine the other preservatives, calories, and saturated fats in these highly processed and flash-frozen items. Dehydration itself preserves the food, so any salt used in the recipes in this book is for taste and not preservation. Too, flash freezing is recognized by the Department of Agriculture to deplete vitamins and nutrients from food to a degree twenty to forty times that of dehydrating.

When you make your meals yourself, you choose your own fresh ingredients. You know exactly what goes into what you feed your family. No more worrying about your familys allergies and dietary restrictions. No difficult-to-pronounce chemicals or additives. By doing it yourself, you have the ability to create a meal that is specific to your familys needs. well... apple pie in a bag!

Getting started is easy. apple pie in a bag! Getting started is easy.

Most of your meals in a bag will require the use of your already-dehydrated foods. If you have yet to dehydrate anything, then we suggest picking up The Ultimate Dehydrator Cookbook , our must-have A-to-Z guide for dehydrating. Also, some of the meals in this book will require fresh produce that we will teach you to dehydrate to make a complete meal, so get those dehydrators ready! Assembling Your Meals in a Bag For optimal storage, your dehydrated items should be stored in vacuum- sealed bags containing an oxygen pack. Those vacuum- sealed bags may then be double-bagged inside a puncture-proof and light-proof Mylar bag, which you may label with the recipe title and instructions. For the vacuum-bag ingredients, we have organized the recipes in this book into Large Bag and Small Bag categories, as sometimes certain items must be kept separate. Each bag should contain an oxygen pack and be vacuum-sealed separately.

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