While the thought of making up casseroles and freezing them might not be appealing to your family, there are many ways that you can use your freezer to speed up cooking preparations. Here’s one example:
I really do not enjoy chopping up onions (does anyone?), but I do love how they taste in recipes, so I’ve found that my best options are to buy bags of frozen already-chopped onions at the store (which I have done when I’ve found a good sale on them!) or to chop them in bulk and freeze them. I usually opt for the latter since it just seems fresher to me, for some reason.
I did a big batch of onions on Freezer Cooking Day and thought I’d share what works for me:
1) Cut off the ends, peel, and cut in fourths.
2) Stick in the food processor and chop. If you don’t have a food processor, you can also use a blender, though it will chop the onion pretty fine.
3) Measure 1/2 cup of chopped onions into small sandwich baggies and then stick these into a freezer bag (as shown above). Freeze.
You can then just pull out a bag of chopped onions and use them in recipes whenever they call for chopped onion. Doing them in bulk like this saves a lot of time and effort–and tears! However, if I had followed the advice from Meal Planning Mommies here, I wouldn’t have had to worry about the tears!