Ice trays – their Sneaky little secret

When I was a kid, I hated onions. My mother, like most, was probably ready to throttle me. She would put the onions into her mixer and “sneak” them into recipes attempting to fool me. I was on to her. As I said at the time, “It’s not their shape I don’t like, mom. It’s the whole idea!” I was a special child. In any case, now, many millennium later I’ve discovered the beauty of her thinking. And gone one step further.

I do a lot of cooking for one and spontaneous meals for more, then stop for days at a time and eat elsewhere. So keeping ingredients fresh isn’t always easy. Salad mix is my downfall. I crave it in binges. I can’t help it. Then Monday comes around and there’s nothing but mush. Onions, too. And they just don’t keep well once cut. So I says to myself, “Self, you keep wasting money on onions and using a little bit of them, how can we fix this?” And I remember what my momma always said… see that, that was the cue to a song and I let it go. I can do it. What she said in fact was, “there’s no onion in there.” It was lies!

But what I remembered was the mush. So I pull out my wee food processor and I put the leftover onion in and I hit cremate. Okay, it doesn’t actually have cremate as a button. If it did, I would have paid more for it. As it is, it just says pulverize (which is nice, too). But it was still kinda lumpy. A dash of water, once chicken stock and eventually – a touch of olive oil went in to make everything run more smoothly. I re-smushed. Now I had this slurry of fabulous onion-ness. What to do with it? I pulled out an ice-cube tray (in this case, I eventually bought special ones – I fear non-pure ice in my drinks more than zombie attacks) and sprayed it with olive oil (I’m not sure why, but it felt right) then poured in the slurry.

Okay I lied. The first time maybe I did that. Now, I almost always toss in some ground rosemary first. What could I ever be cooking that doesn’t need both together?? Exactly! And then freeze into wee cubes of seasoning. Not quite fresh, not quite dried – but excellent for last minute sauces, recipes and soups. I keep them (the cubes) in a Tupperware container and just grab when needed. They keep well, but not eternally. It’s never happened to me, but I would guess after a long time the onion would “grow strong like bull.”

Sigh. It’s a thing of beauty. And it’s not laziness. It’s conservation. I wouldn’t do it with garlic, though I know some who do. Chopping fresh garlic is one of the few joys in life. But an onion, well, it’s the workhorse really. Word to the wise though, wrap the ice tray in plastic wrap. Trust me.