 Hi, Jessica here, Editor-in-Chief of Mother Earth Living Magazine. And today we're going to be talking about a really great homemade convenience food that you can make and stash in your freezer. It's caramelized onions. As you probably know, caramelized onions are amazing and a huge variety of recipes. They can form the base of all sorts of stir fries. They can go into cast rolls. They can go into soups and they lend an amazing flavor. But the thing about it is, it takes a while to really coax all that flavor out of the onions, talking at least 30 minutes in the pan. And so if you're taking 30 minutes to make one ingredient, that is going to really lengthen the amount of time it takes you to make your dish. So what we're going to do is cook up a big vat of caramelized onions, portion it out into individual sizes and stash it in the freezer. So you can pull them out. They are super convenient and it's going to make it much easier and faster for you to make wholesome homemade foods on busy weeknights when you are short on time. All right, so the first thing we need to do is slice our onions. I love to use a mandolin for a project like this. Number one, it makes very fast work of cutting a whole bunch of onions. And if we're going to do this, we might as well make a huge batch so we have plenty in the freezer. Number two, the mandolin ensures that almost all of your onion slices are roughly the same size, which is beneficial because they're then going to cook at the same rate. Of course if you don't have a mandolin, you can certainly just slice them by hand and that will work too. All right, so we have all of our onions prepped and now we're going to go ahead and put them in our skillet. So I'm going to add a couple tablespoons of oil, olive oil and a couple tablespoons of butter to my skillet and put it over low to maybe a little towards medium heat. And we're going to let this butter melt and then we'll add our onions. Okay, so our oil and butter are hot and shimmering and so we're going to go ahead and add all of our onions. Sizzling sound is what you're looking for. And let's get it spread out so they're as close as possible to a single layer. We're going to cook these down for about 10 minutes just as they are. You can give them some stir to make sure that they're coated in the olive oil and butter. And we'll come back in about 10 minutes and give them a little bit of salt. Okay, so our onions have been cooking for about 10 minutes. They are sweated, which means basically they're soft and they've started releasing their juices into the pan. And so at this point we're going to go ahead and just add a decent amount of salt all over the top of the onions. Kind of eyeball it. And if you wish, you can also sprinkle about a teaspoon or so per onion of sugar into this that will make a sweeter flavor and kind of help bring out the sweetness of the onions. I prefer not to use sugar in mine, but that is up to you. So once you've added salt and if you wish the sugar, give them a stir. And we're going to just keep cooking. Keep it over the medium to low heat. If you notice that it starts to stick to the pan, you can reduce your heat to low. And if you're still having problems with it sticking to the pan, pour in just a little bit of water, just enough to kind of coat the bottom of the pan, but not a lot of water. And that'll help make sure that you prevent sticking. And we're going to leave this alone and let it cook for another 30 to 45 minutes or so. So this is what we want the caramelized onions to look like. You can see they have a lot of really dark color. You want to make sure and scrape all the dark bits off the pan. That is where the flavor is. So then we're going to go ahead and let this cool and then put it into packages for the freezer. I might use freezer bags for this. You want to make sure that you let the onions come completely to room temperature if you're going to put them into plastic. Hot food in plastic makes the plastic leech chemicals into your food. So you want to definitely let it cool completely if you're going to put it into a plastic bag. Otherwise you can also use a small glass jar that will work perfectly fine. You can use the frozen caramelized onions just as you might freshly made caramelized onions. Throw them straight into a pan for stir fry, straight into a pot of stew, and they're going to bring a lot of delicious flavor into any dish that you make.