Many gardeners freeze, can or give away surplus zucchini and tomatoes, but what about drying them? Not only is drying a delicious way to preserve and concentrate the flavors of your fruits, veggies and herbs, but when dried, produce requires little space — and no electricity — to store, so you can enjoy it throughout fall and winter. Plus, cooking with delicious home-dried foods is as easy as cooking with packaged convenience foods, at a fraction of the cost.

What can you dry? From tomatoes and beets to sweet corn and green beans, almost any vegetable that can be blanched and frozen is a likely candidate for drying, along with apples, strawberries, peaches and most other fruits. In times past, people waited for a spell of dry, breezy weather to dry bunches of herbs or peppers threaded on a piece of string. You will need only a warm oven to dry a basket of shiitake mushrooms. Living in an arid climate where sun-drying is practical, you may not need a dehydrator — although you may decide you want one. (To learn more about plug-in and solar dehydrators, see www.MotherEarthNews.com/Solar-Food-Dehydrators.aspx.)

Do you want the simplicity of scalloped potatoes from a box — but homegrown? Or how about the makings for dozens of pasta salads in which everything but the noodles came from your garden or a local farm? With a stash of dried foods, you really can drag through the door after work, set some dried veggies to soak, and then flop down for a few minutes, talk to the kids or change your clothes. By the time you're back in the kitchen, you'll be greeted by plump, pre-cut, organically grown veggies ready to be stir-fried, sautéed, simmered or tossed with dressing for a fast salad.

Organic convenience foods have their place in busy lives, but you pay for the time and energy involved in their creation. You subsidize the growing, drying, packaging, shipping and marketing, and it all adds up to some hefty retail prices.

Drying with attitude

In Lanesboro, Minn., organic gardener and food-drying expert Mary Bell thinks people should look at food drying with a creative eye. Bell has invented what can only be called new foods, like succulent "half-dried tomatoes" seasoned with basil and thyme or "Can't A Loupe Candy" — chunks of cantaloupe seasoned with ginger and powdered sugar before being dried. To deal with bountiful crops of hard-to-preserve eggplant, she figured out how to cut eggplant into strips, soak them in a salt/lemon juice solution and dry them into pastalike strands. For overripe zucchini, she marinates thin slices before drying them into chips.

The attitude behind her newest book, Food Drying with An Attitude, is sustainability. "I want everybody to have food they can supply for themselves year round," Bell says. "Drying can provide a way to use things you already have instead of buying from some other place.

"If people are given permission to try new things, they are often surprised at what they can dry — like marked-down bananas at the store," Bell says.

Food drying 1-2-3 easy

1. Slice or dice food into small, uniform pieces.

2. Dip the pieces in an acidic solution or blanch them to enhance the quality of the final product.

3. Place the pieces in single layers to dry, and turn as needed to help them dry more quickly.

Most vegetables are dried to a crisp, but fruits are done when they become leathery. Bell points out, however, that there is plenty of room in between, for example, savory chunks of half-dried tomatoes. If you want to try drying using only a sunny windowsill during the day and a warm (from the pilot light) oven at night, start with veggies that can be dried raw — garlic, mushrooms, cherry tomatoes and peppers — and fresh greens such as kale or chard. First wash greens in cool water, then pat dry between towels. Onions, okra, horseradish, garlic and many herbs are dried raw, too.

The high sugar and acid content of apples, pears and peaches make them great candidates for dip-and-dry treatments, in which cut pieces are dipped in an acidic solution to stop the oxidation process that darkens them. Orange, pineapple or cranberry juice work well, and you can drink the leftover juice when you're finished. You may like the flavor enhancement from using pineapple juice, or the colors you get from letting apple slices soak in cranberry juice for an hour before drying. Some vegetables also darken when dried, but that's easy to prevent by soaking the pieces in a mixture of one part lemon juice to four parts water.

Check your berries

If you want to replace the organic trail mixes you've been buying with a homemade version, go for it! Blueberries, cherries, cranberries, seedless grapes and figs do require extra steps to get great results, but if you can boil water, you can dry them.

After they've been washed, drained (and pitted if necessary) "check" the fruits by dipping them in rapidly boiling water for two seconds, or pour boiling water over them for a count of four. After the water drains away, spread the fruits on cookie sheets, pat dry, and pop them in the freezer for one to two hours. Then take them out and dry them right away. The boiling water cracks the skins and the brief freezing breaks down cell walls, transforming the fruits into incredibly tasty nuggets for snacks, cereals or baking. Try drying them halfway, to the chewiness of raisins, which will require refrigerated storage because of their high moisture content. Fruit dried until near-crisp can be stored in any cool, dark place. To rehydrate, just soak them in water for an hour before eating.

Steam, blanch basics

When preparing veggies for drying, blanch them in boiling water, or use a steamer to limit their uptake of water and fix enzymes. Broccoli florets and carrot slices that are steam-blanched and dried transform into soup in minutes, and rehydrated steam-blanched green beans almost pass for the freshly picked version.

Sweet corn is easiest to handle if you blanch whole ears before cutting off the kernels. Instead of blanching beets, winter squash and pumpkins, roast them until almost done before peeling, cutting into chunks and drying them.

Simple, safe storage

Many foods that seem to be dried to perfection when you stash them in airtight containers may surprise you by going soft again as moisture levels equalize inside the container. Putting the pieces back into the dehydrator for an hour or two will fix the problem, making it possible to store the food at cool temperatures for up to a year. Keep chewy cherries, half-dried herbed tomatoes and other dried foods that are still slightly moist in your refrigerator or freezer to prevent mold. Freezer storage also is a good idea for foods dried outdoors because it will kill any insects hiding in crevices.