What does "dried in vacuo" mean? What organic solvent is appropriate to - (Apr/20/2011 )

I'm just starting my research, but I've been out of an academic lab setting for a couple years now, so I apologize if this is a stupid question.

I'm trying to replicate a procedure published by another research group, but their methods section is not detailed as a protocol. The goal is to synthesize a phospholipid/polymer vesicle. According to the protocol, each component (the polymer and phospholipid) is supposed to be dissolved in an organic solvent, "dried together in vacuo", then added to DI water.

What method does "dried in vacuo" indicate? Does that mean drying in a vacuum desiccator? Or vacuum distillation?

I also have some secondary questions:
A ) How am I supposed to determine what organic solvent to dissolve the lipid constituents in? No specific solvent is specified in the protocol, but I'm going to start trying with the standard chloroform:methanol mix, but what ratio should they be in. Should I be using 2:1 or 9:1?

B ) How am I supposed to determine how much organic solvent to dissolve the lipid constituents? I will be using about ~5 mg total lipid constituents.

Thank you kindly!

dried in vacuo just means dried under vacuum (as opposed to drying under streaming nitrogen). they most likely dried their solutions in a speedvac or equivalent.