Try these recipes for delicious sun-dried tomatoes, dried blueberries, and homemade fruit leather.

Make your own sundried tomatoes for a taste of summer all year round.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—August is peak harvest season for many delicious fruits and vegetables. By finding ways to store and preserve them through the coming months, you can not only take advantage of your local farmer’s market, you’ll also avoid contributing to the carbon footprint of produce that’s shipped and trucked from warmer parts of the world during fall and winter. And sure, we’re all tempted to buy, say, strawberries in January. But they rarely taste as good as they should.

Drying, or dehydration, is perhaps the oldest method around for preserving food. It’s also the greenest: The process takes little or no energy input, and the dried food stores a long time at room temperature in any old airtight jar. Best of all, drying food is easy and inexpensive to do; most of the work goes on in the background while you’re doing other things. You can even dress them up in a nice jar with some ribbons and a card, and you have much-appreciated holiday gifts when December rolls around.

Here are three great projects to get you started:

Tomatoes
Plum tomatoes are traditionally used for drying (there are even special small plum varieties designed for it), but you can use any perfectly ripe tomatoes with no soft spots. If you can find some of the super-sweet Sun Gold variety, I find they make absolutely amazing dried tomatoes.

Tomatoes will dry faster if you cut them and remove excess moisture and seeds, so cut cherry tomatoes in half or larger tomatoes into quarters. Take each cut chunk and pull out the seeds and the jelly around them, using your finger to sweep out any large globs that remain (you can add the squeezings to your next batch of soup stock). If your tomatoes are huge, you may want to cut them into smaller pieces. Spread the prepared tomato chunks in a single layer, not touching each other, cut side up, on a cookie sheet or something similar (I use a couple of perforated pizza pans).

You can buy drying racks or make your own by stretching some nylon netting over a wood frame. Even a clean cardboard tray will do. In dry climates you can put them in the sun to dry out, covering them with cheesecloth to keep insects off. Those of us in more humid areas can make a quite satisfactory product by putting the rack or sheet in the oven and setting it as low as it will go (200ºF or less). Leave the food to dry for six to eight hours; I like to do this at night so I’m not adding heat to a hot house.

Your sun-dried, or oven-dried, tomatoes are ready when they are shrunken and leathery looking but still a little flexible. Don’t worry if they seem a little crunchy in places, they are still perfectly delicious, and the moisture will redistribute itself in storage. Store the pieces in clean glass jars, preferably with airtight lids, and out of direct light.

Using your dried tomatoes: Sprinkle small bits on salads to add a taste of summer sunshine when fresh tomatoes are a distant memory (those mealy things in the winter supermarket aren’t edible in my opinion, and hothouse tomatoes take lots of energy to produce and ship). If they are too chewy for your taste, put a small handful in a jar, just cover with warm water, and let them soak overnight in the fridge before adding them to your salad. You can also use dried tomatoes in cooking (they plump up as they cook, so add a little extra liquid). Remember they are quite concentrated: Use perhaps a quarter as much as you would fresh or canned. You can also pulverize dried tomatoes in a blender or food processor with some crumbs and other dry bits and use the powder in cooking; it’s like instant tomato paste.