A couple weeks ago Nick and I made mead. It was my first time actually participating in the brewing process beyond just capping the bottles.

For my non-brewer friends, mead is made like this: boil a crapton of water, pour >10 lbs of honey in, put 7 lbs of fruit into a bag and steep it just like tea. Add some yeast, let it cool (and sit for a couple months) and it goes from a hot yummy breakfast drink to alcohol.

Me adding in 13ish pounds of honey to the pot

This is what the fruit looked like before it was steeped

At the end of the day, I ended up standing in my kitchen with a giant sack of hot mushy leftover fruit bits, pondering how my life had gotten to this wonderful point. I then started to brainstorm what I could do with the leftovers. Nick and I looked over at the dehydrator on our counter, and decided we wanted to see what happened if we just dried it out.

I look ridiculous but this is me steeping the fruit bag

After a bunch of hours, the fruit finally turned into a mixed fruit leather. It was a combination of blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, mangoes, and oranges – it was sweet, citrusy and seedy.

The fruit, halfway through drying

Nick cut it up into little pieces, and added it into the granola/granola bars. The fruit is so delicious, it makes me so excited to drink the mead (it only has two months left!)

The granola bars and chopped up fruit bits

Related: Granola bars, made from leftover barley