I have a problem. I have too much food and too many places to store it. 

I know, you’re probably sobbing for me already. Your sympathy soothes my woes. However, before we descend into utter tragedy and mourning, allow me to fully explain the situation. 

Have you ever had that problem where if you clean a flat surface off in the house, it suddenly accumulates a bunch of new junk within a week? Perhaps a pile of laundry that seems to spontaneously regenerate. 

My predicament is not unlike these baffling phenomena. Because I work with food for a living, I have acquired a comprehensive system of storage, including (but not limited to) three chest freezers, an upright fridge and freezer, pantry cupboard, pantry room, walk-in cooler and walk-in freezer.

These are just the places where I keep some of our personal food. Then there are the retail freezers, coolers, dry storage and more.

Since I have that backup storage, sometimes I put my best intentions where I work and everything else piles up in the peripheral places. 

One such item, stacked in a corner of the cooler, is apples. 

We normally purchase a ton of apples from OHF Orchards for farm purposes and for personal consumption. They hold pretty well from fall into early spring, when they begin to lose their best flavor and ultimately go bad. I spend my winters periodically checking the boxes and throwing out any bad ones to keep the rest as long as I can. I hate wasting food, so about this time of year, I get pretty nervous about any remaining apples.

As I was picking up my sons from the babysitter’s place a week or so ago, they came out munching dehydrated apple chips that the babysitter had made. When I was their age, I remember strings adorned with spiralized apples drying in the kitchen ceiling. Inspiration struck, and I knew how I was going to use up those apples in the cooler. 

Having bought a new dehydrator for the butcher shop not that long ago, I decided we would do this the easy way rather than stringing apples out in the open. 

I work six days out of the week and was concerned about the time it would take to get this done, but this turned out to go much quicker than I thought it would, even though I didn’t use a spiralizer.

I cut the apples with a knife, but a mandoline would work slightly better for consistency’s sake. I cut some apples into thin wedges and others across the halfway mark after coring them. Use what shapes you prefer or what method you feel comfortable executing.

As I cut the apples, I threw them into a bowl of water with a hefty squirt of lemon juice to keep the slices fresh. After a whole three minutes of internet searching, I learned to pat dry the slices before arranging them on my dehydrator trays. I will tell you this is probably good advice—which I promptly skipped in favor of getting the job done quicker. I crammed the slices onto the trays pretty close together, making sure there was still enough space for air to pass through the slices, and as they dehydrate, they are bound to shrink and not expand.

My eldest helped me with this job, and helped himself to fistfuls of apples. We arranged them almost as efficiently as he picks blueberries, I should note.

After the trays were filled, we sprinkled them with cinnamon. Brown sugar is another option to add flavor; however, I planned to feed these to my kids and apples seem to have enough natural sugar, so I really didn’t feel compelled to exacerbate that particular element. Into the dehydrator they went, and into Ziploc bags for later lunching once the process was done. 

The way out here we try to use our surplus before it becomes a lost cause. If that gives us an excuse to get creative, then that’s even better. At least the apples shrink once dehydrated. What’s a little more storage in the pantry to replace the box taken from the cooler?