My Journey of Hope: In Praise of Mirepoix

A couple of years ago, my beloved friend Panda said to me one day, "Do you want to have a day where we make mirepoix?"

Now, you may be asking yourself what exactly mirepoix is. I certainly did! Basically, it's a bunch of finely chopped vegetables.

The standard seems to be 2 cups onion, and 1 cup each carrot
 and celery, but we find 1:1:1 ratio fits best into the bags

And what Panda proposed was to batch prep bags upon bags of them. So, a group of us got together, and we chopped onions, celery and carrots until we had gone through all of the bags of veggies. There was a LOT!

One of the mirepoix-making days at Mother's
Little Sanity Break, hosted at my home

Several people chopped all at once (we swapped out when someone got tired or needed a break) and we put a cup of each vegetable into a sandwich-sized freezer bag.

This is about a third of what we made
that day!

Those were in turn put into gallon-sized bags and frozen. Then all you have to do is pull one out when you need it! It cuts SO much time out of meal prep, and I can hardly remember what it was like before we started pre-making mirepoix! The first time, we prepped something like 40 bags of the stuff! That got shared out between whoever had chipped in money for the supplies, and when somebody ran short, we did it again. Panda and I last did it in February - or more accurately, Panda did it all and gifted me with the finished product for materials costs (I was trying to get my mum through my dad's hospitalization, and Panda knew how much this would help me) - and I still have a full gallon bag in the freezer. I pulled one out just last night, to make the base of Hubby's chicken and rice "I don't feel well" soup. Cut my prep time in at least half, and dinner was on the table in under 30 minutes.

Chicken and rice soup, bubbling away on the stove!

So here's to de-cluttering your cooking process with mirepoix!