The age old answer concerning the question of too much...
It's Christmas 1970 something and I unwrap a Ronco Dehydrator! Well, I remember it as being mine but I don't really know, I may have just commandeered it. No Looking Back!! I dried fruit and veggies, made yoghurt and had all kinds of fun. At some point it died and there where none to be found. Every few years electric dehydrators would show up on the market...and then my cousin Linda told me about a cookbook for outdoor adventurers that had ideas on dehydrating all kinds of veggies, meats (other than jerky) and recipes to be made from said shriveled up commodities. The Hungary Hikers Book of Good Cooking by Gretchen McHugh, And there, on page 31, was a diagram and instructions to make your own dehydrator! So now I have a homemade one that I got my dad to make, that weekend, a store bought one that is four trays stacked up, the kitchen oven set on the lowest temperature and of course the very first item used for dehydrating - the sun. 5/13/2019 Note: My dad has been "Yard Saleing" (the art of looking through other people excess in the hopes of finding something you want and/or need.) and he has brought me another electric dehydrator with...drum roll please...seven trays. At this rate it will be my yard sale someone will be buying electric dehydrators from. I love my dad, he probable just doesn't want to have to make another one!
My mom made fruit leathers when we where kids and my brother and I were fascinated with the whole process and we loved eating them. The store bought fruit leathers of today are a sorry shade of the real thing. She would puree peaches, apricots and anything else she had in abundance, add a bit of sugar if needed and cooked it down to thicken the puree. She lined rimmed baking sheets with plastic wrap, poured in the fruit puree and set the pans out in the Tucson sun on a picnic table, cover it all up with a couple layers of cheese cloth and hoped it wouldn't rain. A couple of days later she would take a clean pair of scissors and cut strips of fruit leather and plastic wrap and roll them up. Placed upright in tall Tupperware containers she would hide them, lock them up in the freezer (yeah we had an extra refrigerator that had a paddle lock on the freezer door to keep us kids out of the cookies and other goodies stashed in there for my dad's lunches and stuff) and dole them out a to us "starving kids".
My passion these days seems to be drying and sometimes powdering left over and "compostable" veggies. Large harvests, gleaned and gifted fruits and vegetables, the limp celery and soft carrots, the woody stems to mushrooms and asparagus... I store my powdered veggies in tightly closed glass jars placed in a cupboard away from heat and bright light. I use them regularly in soups, stews, etc. and then make more as needed.