Dried Vegetable Flakes

I bought a book at a garage sale a few years back, "Dried gifts in a jar".  Mostly it's soups, stews and chili's. I read through and oogled a few of the recipes. I didn't make any because I couldn't find dried vegetable flakes in the spice section at the grocery store. I finely went online to several of the organic bulk spice sites. Guess what? Dried vegetable flake are the simple triad of soups and stews. It's dried carrots, celery and onions. You can also get variations on combinations of dried vegetables. I got all excited reading through some of the more "exotic" combinations and had finely settled on 1 oz Mediterranean, 6 oz original and 6  oz of the Italian. With shipping it would have come to $24.00. I nearly fainted! When I had my breath back I thought...WAIT A MINUTE! I have a food dehydrator. After a little trial and error I learned some veggies need to be blanched (dropped in boiling water for 45 second to 2 minutes after brought back to a boil). Which did better drying and cooking very thin and which did better albeit longer drying time thicker cut. I dried green pepper, carrots, celery, potato's, garlic and so on. I also learned I like them better stored solo. Sometimes I want more carrots in an individual recipe, sometimes none.

I went on to create many dried soup recipes. I'll be posting them as I cook with them and fine tune the recipes.
Not only do they store and keep well, they do indeed make a wonderful gift.