Thrifty Thursday: Cutting and Freezing Onions

My best cost saving and time saving measure is to cut a bag of onions when you can get them on sale and freeze them.  I don't mean to freeze them whole!  They are easiest to use for me diced and freeze great like that.

The great news is that you only have to make a mess once and you get lots of use for it.  It means that you only have to go around smelling like onions once which is a big plus for me.  The first step is to peel the onions.

 I start by cutting one end off and cutting as thin of slices as I can.  It doesn't have to be that close to the edge of the onion if you want to do a little dicing up later.

Then, I flip the onion the other way and cut so that there are cuts in both directions.  It take a little to hold the onion together with all those cuts.

In order to dice, you just need to cut along the edge and all of the onion is diced up in little pieces.  If they aren't small enough for your tastes then you can go over whatever is too big with the knife a few times but usually it is the edges only where I didn't get close enough to the edge with my other cuts.

I label my bag for the freezer so that I will know what it is later.  I often put things in smaller bags to freeze but I find that onions tend to break off really easily when frozen so I don't bother wasting the bags on my onions.  This bag fit at least 5-6 onions before I was done.

I took the ends and made a chicken stock with some chicken bones that I had in the fridge from a chicken that I had made earlier in the week.  Lots of the ends of the onions went in and ends of celery and asparagus that I was keeping in the freezer.  Sometimes I also have carrots but there weren't any in this bag of leftover veggies.  I put in bay leaves, thyme, and ground pepper.  Add some water and boil for at least 3 hours and you have a great broth.

I took the other ends of the onions and put them in a freezer bag to wait for the next time that I was going to be making stock.  It will hold bits of all of the veggies before I am ready for some more chicken stock.  Keep a bag in the freezer and you will always be ready to make stock when the chicken bones are ready to be boiled.

The great thing is that I bought a big bag of onions for around $2 and I will have them without any fuss when I need to make stuffing, soup or add onions to any dish in the future!  It is way cheaper then going to the store to buy one onion when I need it and saves the time when you need to make your recipe.  I hope that you try this in the future to save your time and money!!