We are mostly weekend-warriors when it comes to cooking. We will buy a bag of onions for something we are cooking, and we might use some onions from the bag for something else down the road, but usually the rest of the bag goes bad before we can use them all.

Because of this we started not keeping onions on hand, but instead would buy a single large Spanish onion for whatever we were making. We eliminated the wasted food problem, but we pay about three times more for the large onions rather than just buying a bag of cooking onions.

Friday night when we were shopping for chili ingredients, the large individual onions were $1 per pound and a three pound bag of small onions was only $1.50. I think one of the large onions is probably a pound if not a little more. A solution to this dawned on me then and I don't know why I didn't think of it sooner: I could chop up an entire bag of onions, put individual portions in zip lock freezer bags and freeze all of them.

Tonight I chopped up all three pounds of them, which was 16 onions, and it resulted in eight cups of chopped onions. I measured one cup into each zip lock bag. Not only will this prevent waste, but it will be much easier when it comes time to use them. Just get a bag from the freezer and dump it into the pot. I also want to do the same thing with green peppers.

After chopping about the third or fourth onion my eyes were burning and watering so bad I could not continue. I took a large box fan and set it on the counter in such a way that the onions were downwind of me and none of the vapors could get to my eyes. It worked perfectly.