Back when I cooked for a family (I just have a dog now!) I had a large and wonderful food dryer -- custom-built by Handy Husband. We dried lots of stuff -- fruits, vegetables, you name it. I used to make a mix of dried vegetables, small-size, and put them in coffee cans in the pantry, for making soup or adding to rice or stews or whatever.
Now you can buy a very nice kitchen-size food dryer for under fifty bucks at places like Walmart and Costco. It's electric, quiet, easily cleaned, and has several trays so you can do more than one thing at a time.
If you get one, you can do a tray of onions, a tray of celery, a tray of carrots, peas, green beans, etc. Just cut them up to about bite-size and spread them over the tray and dry them. Then mix them together in a can or jar and use it for "soup mix" or add it to rice.
The fringe benefit of drying stuff like this is how wonderful the house smells! My oldest daughter dried lots and lots of apples in the fall, sprinkled with a bit of cinnamon, and her kids are constantly snitching out of the food dryer. (Me too when she did it while I was visiting!)
There used to be commercial mixes of dried veggies on the spice shelves at the grocery store, and may still be, I haven't seen 'em for years.
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