I’ve just arrived in Blighty for the Christmas hols. The last week or so was a blur of packing, provisions and purchases.

The Provisions Bit: We are good friends with our immediate neighbours who are in possession of a strange thing called a dehydrator. It’s basically a sort of giant heater (rather like a hairdryer) that dries out almost any type of fruit that you put inside it to a crisp crunch.

It looks like this:

…and it makes for extremely smug, nutritious airplane food; I don’t often feel very clever on a 14 hour economy flight to London from Singapore, but producing my bag of dried goodies at 37,000 feet did make me smile the smallest of smiles.

*Spoiler alert* It does takes an age to fully dehydrate things; sliced strawberries (on the bottom layer) worked the fastest at about 5 hours. Yup, you read that right, FIVE hours.

We also did banana, kiwi, green apple and pineapple.

Smug mama central: I crisped up some organic kale, below, which worked amazingly well and was delicious with a bit of added salt (remove the main stalk from each leaf if you ever try this; I didn’t and it is horribly hard and woody).

The Packing Bit: That’s simple enough. Cost Centre #1 and #2 want to bring every hardback book and soft toy that they own, to England for Christmas, and they can’t. Militant discipline required (except when it comes to packing my own stuff, of course).

The Purchases Bit? That’s a whole other story. To follow in Part II.

Nala and Iswen’s dehydrator is from Aliexpress – the amazing site that is China’s equivalent to amazon.com. You can find similar here.