Homemade Fruit Leather

As many of my friends know, I recently watched the movie "Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead" and have since become obsessed (well, not really!) with making our own green juice (and any other kind of juice). It's nutritious and delicious. We don't follow the juicing diet to a "T" but do try to replace some meals with the juice.

If any of you have ever made your own juices, you know that you have lots of leftover pulp. We don't have a compost, and I feel bad for just throwing it away (especially the fruit pulp!). So, I searched around for ideas of what to do with the fruit pulp (wow, people do a lot of things with pulp) and finally decided to try to make fruit leather (aka fruit roll ups).

I got the idea from Lullaby Lubbock and followed this recipe.

A few of the modifications I made include:

• instead of cutting up fruit, I used the juicing pulp (included in this batch is strawberries, pineapples, mangos, green apples, carrots, and watermelons)
• replaced the sugar with tubanado sugar and agave nectar. I had enough pulp to make two separate batches, so we'll see which one ends up tasting best.

Here are some pics from this first little experiment!

Some of the fruit pulp from juicing

Looks yummy (???)

I was too lazy to pull out the Cuisinart so I just used my blender.

Placing them in the oven.

Not near enough time!

Then there were two! This was after the little fire. They had already baked for 10 hours at this point and definitely not done.

A couple of additional pointers:

• make sure the leather is spread thinly. Mine cooked for over 15 hours and still isn't quite right.
• BE SURE to cut back the edges of the parchment paper....I had a little fire this morning! Fortunately, I heard and smelled it before any damage was done (damage to my oven...I definitely had damage to that tray of fruit leather!)

On a side note, Kelly has made some EXCELLENT treats over the past week. Stay tuned for recipes and ideas!

We're linked up!