Drying foods the easy way  Use a dehydrator to make tasty snacks
Perhaps the oldest and easiest form of food preservation is sun-
drying. But variable weather and bug curiosity make this an iffy
proposition. The simple solution is a food dehydrator. The
devices function in any season, but it's during the summer, when
copious amounts of ripe fruit are available, that I routinely
use one - not so much to preserve the harvest bounty as to make
healthy snacks.  Even the simplest food dehydrator with a low-
temperature heating element, such as the five-tray Ronco (about
$35), dries many, many foods effectively - the tempting balsamic
strawberry crisps that follow, for instance. Fancier
dehydrators, with heat regulators and fans to circulate the air,
work faster, but the price can zoom to several hundred dollars
for serious preserving tools. You'll find food dehydrators in
cookware and hardware stores and in the cookware sections of
department stores.  Crisp berries  Thin chips of sweet-tart
dried strawberries turne