

From tinting frosting to punching up the flavor of marinades, we’ve got lots of ideas and recipes to help you enjoy it. Beyond that school trip ice cream - and later the occasional think piece on molecular gastronomy or doomsday rations - freeze-dried food stayed off my radar for decades, until a rainbow of freeze-dried fruit popped up at my local Trader Joe’s.īeyond its utility as a quick and nutritious toddler snack, freeze-dried fruit has a surprising array of tasty applications.


We clamored to get our hands on the chalky, freeze-dried Neapolitan stuff, though some of us Jewish day school kids did it surreptitiously, and a few abstained because it wasn’t officially kosher. It’s the astronaut ice cream in the gift shop. I was pretty geeky about aeronautics as a tweenager - I even went to Space Academy - but my strongest memories of the National Air and Space Museum aren’t of the exhibits. There was a visit to the Lincoln Memorial, bagged lunches on the National Mall, then we’d roam a Smithsonian Museum or two. The itinerary never seemed to change, though. As a kid growing up in Baltimore, school trips landed my class in Washington, D.C., several times.
