Seconding their use in soups and braises -- I find the texture of not-entirely-rehydrated items to be a nice complement to the other soup components.
That aside -- I am the cook for my hiking group, which led me to eventually get into dehydrating (one of our group is strong as an ox and will carry anything anywhere including full bottles of liquid courage; but at some point I realized that I was being downright abusive and perhaps I could just, you know, dehydrate the food component of our actual meals instead of making her carry frozen blocks of what-have-you.).
Anyway, I have now looked into a number of cookbooks for dehydrated backcountry eating. As @chromedome has pointed out -- the aim of this type of food is obviously distinct in that it maximizes calories per ounce. In the backpacking context, it also prioritizes the kind of tastiness that will induce an exhausted person to eat more (hello, salt).
But who knows, it may give you some ideas. In order of favor:
"Backcountry Eats" by Kevin Ride (he also has a blog, or used to);
"Dirty Gourmet" by Aimee Trudeau, Emily Nielson, and Mi-Yan Kwan (a lot of the recipes in this book are not from dehydrated components);
"The Dehydrator Bible" by Jennifer MacKenzie, Jay Nutt & Don Mercer (not just backpacking, actually only has one chapter on camp food)
"Mary Bell's Complete Dehydrator Cookbook" (not backpacking either)
"The Dehydrator Cookbook for Outdoor Adventurers" by Julie Mosier.
Unfortunately, the Time Life Good Cook book on "Preserving" does not contain a lot of recipes using dried foods, although it does have a section on the technique.
On the leather thickness problem -- it got easier for me when I bought myself an offset spatula. I then eyeball for variations in translucence. It's aggravating when the middle isn't fully dried but the edge is approaching crispy, so I tend to push more material outward, which creates a bit of elevation at the edge. Then -- when the major portion of the leather is done, I can just cut off the still-moist edges and eat them right then. Like licking the beaters.
If you store your leathers in the freezer, you don't have to worry about residual moisture, but it is annoying to have to freeze something which one was attempting to otherwise preserve.
