Too Much Spinach!

I was at Krogers doing some grocery shopping and looking for bargains on the 4th.  They had just marked down the spinach that was out of date on the 4th...to $1.19 for a big bag.  There were 3 bags and I took all of them.

I'm not a cooked spinach eater, I like it for salad and in place of the lettuce I can't eat on a sandwich.  But these are big bags and I barely made a dent in the first one  so yesterday evening I started dehydrating the leaves.

This was not baby spinach and some of the leaves are huge.  Just break off the stems as they will get too hard and lay out on your trays.  My dehydrator is about 14" in diameter and I only have 4 trays and no temp settings, but it works well.  After about 2 hours or so I had slightly smaller dried leaves.  One large bag covers about 8 trays, you can slightly overlap the leaves since they shrink, but don't overdo it as you want them really dry.

And once they were cooled I put them in a gallon size ziploc for storing.  I may get some mylar storage bags if I can find them with a ziploc, as they will keep out the light.  But these will go in a dark cupboard.  I can use these to add nutrients to soup of all kinds and stir fries.  I'll have to look into what else I can make.

Another option if you find these on sale is to juice them.  You can then dry out the left over pulp for soups.  I have some mixed veggie pulp in the freezer that I am going to dehydrate too.  Just in case the electricity goes out I don't want to lose too much food from the fridge and freezer.
Today is the 9th and there is still nothing wrong with the spinach, I have only found 2 small squashed leaves in the bottom of one bag so far that I did not dehydrate.  So much for best by dates!