Tuesday's tip: Dice onions and freeze

How many dinner recipes start with instructions to dice and saute an onion? So many it's worth dicing all your onions at once and freezing them in a ziploc bag so you can just pull out a chunk and throw it in the pan ready to cook.

Diced onions on the left, ready to freeze. Bag of carrot and onion ends on right, ready to make stock with.

I read a while back that Katie of Kitchen Stewardship does this, but I only got around to chopping up a bunch of onions and freezing them a couple of weeks back. It means I don't know how this tip works long-term, ie. whether the onions get freezer burn, stick together or lose flavour. Those sorts of things. If I do notice anything negative, I'll update this post for you.

So far so good though. It looked like the onions had frozen solid for me, but a light squeeze saw them break apart nicely.

And I'm loving the convenience factor, especially today when I'm tired from a disrupted sleep last night and a cranky toddler today. (I do love you Lily, really I do.) I'm going to make the easiest meal I can think of - butter chicken.

To make it I just need to sauté a handful of pre-diced onion in butter, chuck in an Asian  Home Gourmet spice packet (this is the one pre-mix I do buy - especially for days like this), open a tin of chopped tomatoes and a tin of coconut cream and throw those in, along with some shredded roast chicken (also pulled out of the freezer). The rice goes in my rice cooker - and that's dinner.

Advantages of freezing bulk diced onions

• Your first step for most dinner recipes is already done, saving time and dishes.
• You get all your crying over and done with in one session.
• One chopping board gets really stinky, but then has weeks to recover.
• You can get good bargains buying bulk onions.
• Your bulk lot of onions won't start to rot down before you can use them.