Thinly sliced tri-tip on its way to becoming jerky...

In the fall I went to the Home Orchard Society’s All About Fruit Show in Hillsboro and had a really good time. It was the same weekend as Wordstock, and also my first Wordstock while working for Hawthorne Books so it was a chock full weekend. While at the fruit show I bought a whole bunch of raffle tickets for three reasons — I didn’t pay to get in but I wanted to contribute, there was a beautiful wooden cider press in the raffle that I wanted, and I also liked the looks of the Excalibur Food Dehydrator.

A few months went by before I was home sick in January and got a call from a very nice Home Orchard Society volunteer telling me that I’d won the food dehyrdator! I was pretty dang excited to get the news and even more excited when this man brought the dehyrdator all the way over to my house — what a man.

For the past few months the dehydrator has been shuffled around from the front room to the utility room until I finally plugged it in in the kitchen this weekend and put it to use. In the summer and fall I’ll have plenty to dehydrate — plums, pears, apples, tomatoes and chiles etc. Right now in the garden I’ve got seeds sprouting, and lots of spring growth but not a lot to harvest.

I decided to break my Excalibur in with a little homemade beef jerky this weekend and I’m so glad I did. I read the recipes in the accompanying Excalibur booklet and also surfed online to get some ideas. I ended up hybridizing all of that into a spicy worcestershire, soy, honey and onion marinade that turned out fantastic…

Trimmed and thin sliced tri-tip soaking up the marinade...

Out of the marinade, blotted dry, racked and ready to go...

Six hours later cooling but ready to eat homemade spicy beef jerky

The little engine that could -- my lovely Excalibur Food Dehyrdator

Excalibur Products
www.excaliburdehydrator.com
6083 Power Inn Road
Sacramento, CA 95824