The Chopped Onion Project. Is there a limit to cutting costs?

I realized just how many onions we’ve been using lately. Rather than buying the 12oz bag of chopped frozen onions for $1.00 at Giant, I considered buying onions in bulk to chop myself. Wegmans has a 10 pound bag of onions for $6.99. I could use my mini food processor to dice them two or three at a time while I made dinner. “Easy!”, I thought.

As the tears poured down my face and my eyes burned so bad that I thought I was doing permanent damage, My husband kept saying “Are you OK? This doesn’t look like a good idea”. Then, when I noticed my 17 month old son rubbing his eyes on the floor next to me, I realized that I actually have limits to frugality. In total, It took me about 15 minutes to chop and package those onions to freeze. Those 15 minutes felt like about 10 hours and I still feel like all I can smell is onions when I walk through the kitchen.

At the end of the day, I saved $5.81 for enough onions that will likely last me through three months. While a savings of 54% is pretty impressive on a whole food, it wasn’t enough to endure the noxious fumes that plague me to this day. At the end of a year, I would have saved $24.

We’ll just live recklessly and buy the frozen chopped onions, ’cause you know, we’re extravagant like that:)

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