In defense of jarred garlic

When I think back on 2025, there were several ingredients that shifted how I cooked, but one in particular that changed how often I cooked. Frozen, pre-chopped onions in a bag. The kind you can buy for $2.00 at Jewel-Osco. I had passed them by for years, not because I doubted their usefulness, but because of a vaguely inherited moral resistance to paying someone else to do a task I was technically capable of doing myself. I would linger in the frozen aisle, occasionally lifting a bag into my hand, only to hear— clearly, accusingly —the voices of my female ancestors rising up from whatever afterlife governs thrift, chanting in unison: Just go chop some onions.

I don’t dislike food prep, exactly. But, as I’ve discussed in my ode to the Big Quarterly Prep Day, I do prefer it in ceremonious bursts: a few hours at a stretch, a good playlist, iced coffee sweating onto the counter, the sense that I am provisioning not just dinner but a future version of myself. I chop, bake, mix and freeze with missionary zeal. But between these quarterly bouts of domestic competence lies a slack, unromantic middle ground—weeknights when my freezer reserves have dwindled and my patience along with them.

So when my grocery store ran one of those five-for-five promotions on frozen vegetables — a retail siren song I have never successfully resisted — I tossed a couple of bags of frozen onion into my cart.