My whole family loves pasta. Bruce & the kids love it because it (usually) tastes good (there was a peanut butter pasta experiment that went wrong, but….). I love it because it’s inexpensive, quick, and healthy – a mealtime trifecta in my books!

I have tried all sorts of variations over the years, from basic jarred sauces to from scratch dishes with fresh tomatoes, and have finally found one that everyone mostly likes (my kids hate the mushrooms), has lots of extra veggies in it, is easy to make, doubles well, and freezes well too. I made a batch recently, and photographed the process to share.

Ingredients:

1 tbsp Olive Oil
1 medium onion, diced
3-4 cloves garlic, diced
1 cup celery, chopped
1 1/2 cups carrots, chopped
1 can sliced mushrooms
1-2 cups chopped spinach (frozen is OK)
2 – 3 cans (6-8 cups) tomato sauce
1/2 – 1 cup water
2 tsp dried basil
1 tbsp dried oregano

The one thing that takes time is prepping the vegetables. I have a food processor, and sometimes use it to chop the vegetables, but sometimes I do it by hand.

You will need a large stock pot or similar pot to cook this in.

Pour the olive oil into the pot and heat over medium heat until the oil thins and coats the bottom of the pot. Add the diced onions and garlic. Gently fry until the onion is translucent, being careful not to let them burn. Add the celery and mushrooms.

Add the carrots and spinach, stirring often. Then add all the tomato sauce, and use the water to rinse out the inside of the cans. Finally, add the seasonings. I usually use basil, oregano, a herb & garlic mix, anything italian that I have on hand. Fresh work great, but I always have dried on hand for when I don’t have any fresh.

Once you have added all the ingredients, simmer over low heat for 20 – 30 minutes, to make sure the vegetables soften. You can simmer longer if you’d like.

At this point, the sauce is done! You can freeze some, or feed a large gathering – this recipe makes about 20 servings (1/2 cup each). I made rigatoni for my family the first night:

MMMM good!!

The next day, we invited the office manager from Bruce’s work over for lunch, and I made spaghetti with grilled chicken and this sauce. She loved it!

Using nutritional data from the sides of the packages I used, and the internet for the vegetable calculations, this recipe works out as follows (based on a 1/2 cup serving, 20 servings per batch):

Calories: 43
Protein: 1.6 grams
Carbs: 8 grams
Fats: 1 gram

I did not do a specific cost calculation, but a rough estimate breaks out like this:

Onion: $.50
Garlic: $.25
Carrots: $1.00
Celery: $.50
Olive Oil: $.15
Mushrooms: $.80
Spinach: $.25
Tomato Sauce: $3.75 (3 cans at $1.25 each)
Spices: $.50
Total: $7.70
Per serving: $.39

Total cost would change based on the prices of ingredients in your location.

This sauce is so versatile! Of course, you can add just about any vegetable to it – peppers are an obvious one (allergies prevent me from using them), or broccoli, or any other one you prefer. As well, you can make it a meat sauce by adding well cooked ground beef or turkey. I like to serve it with either grilled chicken breasts, or meatballs for the men in the family. And on a day when I’ve worked a 10 hour shift, and need dinner in a hurry, defrosting a tub of frozen sauce and boiling some water for pasta is a way better option than ordering takeout!

My job is recruiting, specifically, recruiting accounting and finance professionals (this is my background, plus I studied Human Resources when I took my MBA, so it’s a good fit). The city I live in is relatively small (about 650,000), and the business community is small and tight. When I say that, I mean that it is not unusual at all to run into people you’ve worked with at other companies, done business with, gone to school with, etc. This can happen anywhere too – the grocery store, the golf course, at running club, you name it.

I knew we had a small business community, but I didn’t realize just how small until I started my job last week. In the space of a week, I have seen applications from at least 6 people I have worked with (at various companies), plus I’ve come across other people I’ve had contact with over the years in different ways. What I found most interesting, though was this – your reputation stays with you forever.

We had one resume to deal with – I knew the woman. I do not like her, I’ve never liked her. We worked together many years ago, and from my very first day working for that company, she was rude and belittling to me. I didn’t say anything to the person training me – far be it for me to interfere in the hiring process. However, he’d heard about her too – so he called another recruiter friend of his, and got the scoop on dealings with her. Her resume went into the DNU (Do Not Use) pile.

Another person? Well, I knew they’d been let go by one of their employers for cause. I knew that employer, so I called them to determine if they’d hire this person back. The answer was no. Not surprisingly, this employer was not listed on their references. Another resume for the DNU pile.

On the other hand, being terminated does not mean you’ll never get another chance. One resume belonged to a young person who was let go; when we contacted the company they indicated the employee was let go more due to personality conflicts than work performance. That person will be represented by us.

But what has really been driven home to me is that what you do, who you are, and how you treat other people -your reputation - really does follow you forever. I was amazed at how many people I knew  something about, just in my first week. My trainer? Has been doing this for 3 years, and I swear, knows something about everyone. And if he doesn’t, he can look at where they’ve worked, and know someone who knows something.

So why am I posting this? Mostly as a reminder – protect your reputation. It’s the only one you have, and what you do now may come back to haunt you later. Or, if your karma is good… it may pay off in spades.

I have two blogs, in very different, distinct genres. I leave comments (when I can) on other blogs in both those areas, linking back to my relevant blog. In the one genre, a lot of bloggers blog using free Blogspot accounts, whereas in the PF arena, most bloggers are self-hosted and often use WordPress. I only mention this because it becomes relevant shortly….

I like to comment when I read a post that speaks to me. I like to comment when I regularly read the blog, and feel I “know” the blogger (this is especially true of some bloggers who share big chunks of their life). I like to be part of the discussion, part of the community, offer opinions, give support, etc.

So why am I cranky? Well… make it easy for me, please! I understand spam is a major PITA. On my original blog, I have received almost 5000 spam comments in less than 2 years. Eventually I installed a neat little plug in that eliminated almost all those comments, and my life is much easier. In the process, I don’t think I made it tough for my readers to comment either (one little tick box).

But when you use commenting software that requires me to sign in (hello, Disqus, Livefyre), or use Captcha anti-spam features… well, it’s a PITA. I hated Disqus, because having two blogs meant trying to have 2 accounts, and every time I tried to set up two accounts, Disqus tried to combine the two and had me posting as the wrong ID … sigh. I eventually just gave up commenting on Healthy Living/Weight loss blogs with Disqus, because more PF bloggers were using it, so it made more sense to just set up a commenting ID and stay logged in as me from here. NOw, while I don’t love it, it doesn’t make me crazy any more. As for Livefyre, I won’t even go there. I tried to leave a comment on a Livefyre blog this weekend…. it said I could comment as a guest, without logging in… five minutes later, having input all kinds of info, I still couldn’t comment, so I left. (Yes, that was what triggered my petty little rant). And Captcha? I don’t know if I’m getting old (maybe), I’m blind, or I’m just dumb, but I’d say about 50% of the time I either can’t read or enter the codes incorrectly. Which means I just leave the blog then too.

The best blogs are ones that remember me and my email and my blog address – I leave a comment, and everything else autofills. Yes, please! KISS…. Keep It Simple. But even the ones that get confused, and pull in the wrong info (WordPress gets confused sometimes, assigning my PF ID to HL blogs, and vice versa), so long as all I have to do is type in my info, I’m happy!

So here’s my question – is there some value in using these commenting systems? Do you get metrics that tell you something about your commenters? Do you get less comments? More? Enquiring minds want to know! Oh, and does mine work the way I think it should? When you leave a comment, does it remember you? If not, I’ll try to fix it… I know this is petty, but it’s a pet peeve of mine!

/Rant over. Back to your regularly scheduled Monday.

Over at Always the Planner, this blog about what kind of life you want caught my attention. Balance in my life? Yes. I want to work hard, but I want to play hard too.

I loved this post by Erica about learning she had ADHD – it is a real disease, it affects people in ways you just can’t understand until you experience it first hand (one of my sons has it). I’ve wondered from time to time if my own inability to drown out distractions may have had a medical basis!

Andrea always makes me think, laugh, or be glad I no longer live in a small town. This unsent letter to Paypal hit home though – back when I ran an online business, I had more problems with Paypal than I care to remember – them freezing my account was only one of the multitude of issues I fought!

Corey from 20s Finance (and everyone else in the PF blog world, it seems!) was in Denver at FinCon 2012 recently, and wrote this post about investing in yourself. I agree with many of his points – conferences can be a valuable way to build knowledge and connections. I know when I had my eBay business, I went to eBay Live and it was an incredible experience!

Budget & the Beach wrote a great post on defining broke and being poor. I’ll be honest – I’ve been broke. I mean, so broke we had to decide whether to eat or buy gas to get to work; so broke we had to choose between paying the hydro bill and buying diapers. Broke… but not poor. I’ve never truly been poor. And now? I have enough to cover all my needs, and many of my wants. Life is pretty good.

Kraig at Young Cheap Living asks Why Do I Spend so Much Money? On reading his post, it appears he spent money doing things that were important to him, and that he could fit into his budget, but he feels he’s lacking motivation to save. I sympathize, except for us, I’m lacking motivation to pay down debt right now. What to do? Not sure yet….

And that’s a wrap! So many good blogs, so little time…

I love cabbage rolls. No one else in my family does, but I do. However, I have never been taught to make them, and the idea of boiling a cabbage and fussing with rolling them is just not something I have time for. And commercial cabbage rolls are either not that good, or not that good for me… or both.

So I figured I’d try making some lazy ones – all the same ingredients, but no rolling involved. The recipe below is the result. This was not adapted from anything, I simply took the ingredients my mother used to use to make traditional cabbage rolls, swapped tomato sauce for tomato soup (to reduce the salt and sugar), and threw it all in a slow cooker. The result? Yum!! I get a fix for my craving with ease, and it freezes nicely into single serve lunches for me to take to work. Perfect!

Ingredients:

1 lb extra lean ground beef (or turkey)
3/4 cup chopped onion
2 tsp olive oil
1/2 green cabbage (about 5-6 cups shredded)
1 cup uncooked rice (I used half brown, half white)
28 oz tomato sauce
1 tsp sea salt
2-3 cups water

Heat the oil in a non-stick frying pan, and fry the onion until translucent.

Once the onion is soft, add the meat and cook until completely browned.

While the meat is cooking, shred the cabbage.

Once the meat is cooked, layer the ingredients in a greased slow cooker. Start with the cabbage.

Next add the beef and onion mixture.

Pour the rice over the beef, and sprinkle with the salt.

Finally, pour the sauce and water over the entire mixture.

Stir the sauce into the mixture to coat all ingredients, cover, and turn to high.

Cook on high for 3-4 hours, or on low for 7-10 hours. The end result isn’t super pretty – it reminds me of goulash.

This was super easy to prepare, and tastes just like cabbage rolls! It also reheated nicely in the microwave, making it ideal for work lunches – a good thing, as one batch makes 8 servings!

Nutritional data (per ~1 cup serving, makes 8):

Calories: 220
Protein: 16 grams
Carbs: 30 grams
Fats: 5 grams

A rough cost estimate breaks out like this:

Onion: $.50
Olive Oil: $.15
Ground Beef: $3.50
Tomato Sauce: $1.50
Cabbage: $1.00
Rice: $1.00
Total: $7.65
Per serving: $0.96

A fast, inexpensive, and healthy dish – I was very happy with the calories and fat content per serving. Plus it has lots of carbs and veggies – perfect!

So how do our monthly housing costs break down?

These are the basic costs, add to that an amount for maintenance (we have a new house, so other than minor things like furnace filters and light bulbs, we’ve had no issues), or improvements (still need to build a deck, we’d like to improve the yard). As well, there is yard upkeep, which requires a lawnmower and other tools; we live in Canada which requires a snowblower – yes, it is required, I’ve tried to shovel my way out of a snow drift four feet high by eight feet wide by ten feet long. It’s not a pretty sight.

So we need to budget well over $3,000 per month for our basic shelter costs. That is a lot of cash. In the long run, our decision to live where we do has a high opportunity cost. The house we were living in 3 years ago before we decided to move was smaller, but had a correspondingly smaller mortgage. Our housing costs there were lower, but the house was also older and needed significant repairs.

The utilities were so much higher due to a new furnace and air conditioner that we financed through our utility company; these were necessary as our furnace completely failed one October. You cannot survive a Canadian winter without a furnace (our AC had been down for almost two summers already; we bundled the two together to save some money). So we are paying over $800 per month more now – but we were facing over $50,000 worth of repairs at our old place, so our maintenance costs would have been significantly higher.

The main issue is this – the $3,000 we spend on housing is money we are not using for other things, like funding our retirement, building up an emergency fund, or even consumer spending such as travel, clothes, and shoes. This is our opportunity cost – we’ve decided it’s worth it to us, because we love our house (we really put a lot of thought into it, and it is as close to our dream home as we could get). We also spend a lot of time in our home, making it logical for us to put money into what matters most to us. We also live in a pretty good school district; which benefits our children. Bruce is less than 2 miles from work, a major convenience (and a factor in our decision to build where we did).

But if we were paying less for the luxury of living here, how much closer would we be to financial independence? How much more freedom would we have? And do we still feel it’s worth it? As I said yesterday, right now, I do feel it’s worth the cost to live where we do. But once the kids are gone, we’ll be moving on to something smaller.

We live in an 1800 square foot 3 bedroom home with a fully finished basement (another 1100 square feet of living space, with an extra bedroom and bathroom). I mention all this because as we talked about this condominium, Bruce and I both agreed that 1000 square feet with 2 bedrooms sounded like an ideal size for our vision of retirement. It made us ask – how much of our house do we really use? When we really thought about it, there are a lot of areas in our house we rarely use, although there isn’t a lot of wasted space, per se.

We use:

Our bedroom & master bathroom. While we don’t live in this room, it is a well used room. It is huge, simply because we extended the garage and got an extended bedroom to go with it (the bedroom is over the garage). It occupies about 300+ square feet, and it includes a walk-in closet, a deluxe ensuite bathroom with jetted tub (that we do use, although not as often as I’d like), and the bedroom is big enough that I have a small office space set up at the end of it with a desk and filing cabinet. Could we live with a smaller bedroom? Sure, we could.

Kitchen/eating area. I cook, a ton. I love, love, love my kitchen, with a large centre island and overhead skylight (the absolute best upgrade we put in the house, hands down). I have a walk-in pantry, and loads of counter top space. And we use it every day. Right beside it is our dinette area, which doubles as our dining room (because we elected not to build a formal one, we’d never use it). This is about another 350 square feet.

Family room. This room is located off the dinette/kitchen area, and we use it all. the. time. I mean, this is the room we live in. It is where our computers are, the television is, we do the bulk of our socializing, etc. We love this room. It is about 270 square feet.

Laundry room. Our laundry room is in our basement, and aside from our furnace and hot water tank, it holds our deep freeze, second fridge, washer, dryer and a large pantry rack. It is only about 80 square feet, but we use every inch of it.

Exercise area. We set up an area downstairs as our fitness centre. It could be walled off to make another bedroom (it has a large window in it, making it super well lit), or it could be incorporated into our rec room downstairs, but we have set it up for what is important to us – our treadmill, our bike trainers, our free weights, etc. all go in that room. It takes up about 100-120 square feet.

That’s it. Out of almost 3000 square feet of usable space, Bruce and I regularly use about 1100 square feet. Sure, we use some storage space not included here, but truthfully, this is it. So how does the other 1900 square feet get used? Well, we have kids. In general, the basement is the kids domain. So other than the 200 square feet we use, the other 900 is used by them. There is another 250-300 square feet of “common area” hallways, entrances, etc. I suppose I should include that space in the space we use.

We have another two bedrooms and a main bathroom on the main floor (one is for our son, one is rented); those three rooms take up about 400 square feet total too. Finally, there is one room that I would consider wasted space – we have a front room that can either be a dining room or a sitting room; we have it set up as a sitting room but we rarely use it. When we selected a house design we knew that room would not be used much, so we purposely selected the smallest one available. It is about 300 square feet. Really, out of 3000 square feet, about 10% does not get used regularly – not too bad.

What’s my point? Well, two things – one, you probably don’t use all the space you have, and two, that wasted space is costing you money. Right now, we’re doing OK, and we’re happy here, but once the kids are gone, we’ll be looking for a nice little 2 bedroom condo, pronto! Tomorrow, I’ll be posting about the opportunity costs of our housing decisions.

This week Fabulously Broke wrote about thinking of the interest rates on your debt as your rate of return. It’s an interesting way of looking at it, and considering the anaemic returns most investments are giving right now, if you have debt with a higher interest rate than about oh…. 1%, I’d be paying those down pretty quick!

Over at Married with Debt, the issue was auditing your emergency food supply (you do have one, right?). I’ll admit – I have months worth of food in my pantry, and other than a box of juice or two, all of it is fresh and ready to use. However, we don’t have any water stored in case of emergency, so we really should buy a couple of cases of bottled water.

Camping can be an incredibly fun, frugal vacation – if you already have the necessary gear (or can borrow it). If you don’t, camping can be as costly as hotels, as Frugal Portland found out this summer!

Money Infant wrote about the All Cash Diet this week. I’ve tried the envelope system; I’ve tried using jars. We’ve tried a hybrid system, with cash for allowances, groceries and most other expenses; currently we’re using our cash back credit card for most purchases and cash only for allowances. I still haven’t figured out whether any of it makes a difference in our spending.

Jackie at Money Crush wrote about financial independence this week. It’s a simple theory – in order to achieve financial independence, you need to have enough assets to generate enough income to cover your expenses. The lower you can get your expenses, the less of an asset base you will need to be independent. Which works in theory, but I’ve always wondered about covering the cost of inflation?

Cordelia always writes great posts, but this one really resonates with me. How do we do all that we do? We neglect things that don’t matter as much. My house is rarely clean, but I get most of my workouts done, sometimes I don’t write all the posts I’d like to, but I do what I can. Somehow, it all works out.

And finally, over at Daily Money Shot Jana had me in stitches… her daughter ate dog kibble when she was a toddler – or tried to, anyway. Poor Jana had a mini freak out, and pried that kibble out of her daughters mouth, half chewed… anyway, I guess letting my 10 month old son eat sand at the beach all day was bad, then? Oops. (He’s 13 now – he survived fine).

And with that, I’m off to put the finishing touches on my son’s birthday!

I love grilled food – the fact that it’s good for me is just a bonus! In an attempt to jazz up our meals a little, while still making food that Bruce can recognize (still can’t get him to try quinoa… I’m working on it though!), I decided to try chicken kebabs.

A little marinated chicken, a few veggies brushed with olive oil and seasoning salt, and a grill. End result? Yummy!

Ingredients:

6-8 oz boneless, skinless chicken breast
2 tbsp white wine vinegar
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp minced garlic
2 tbsp fresh basil
1 tbsp fresh fennel
1-2 tsp seasoning salt
1-2 tbsp olive oil olive oil
Assorted vegetables, including mushrooms, grape tomatoes, baby potatoes, zucchini, etc.

Prepare the marinade by mixing the vinegar, olive oil, garlic, basil and fennel. Cube the chicken into 1″ cubes, and place in a ziploc bag to marinate. Pour the marinade over the chicken and mix well. Marinate the chicken for 30 minutes to 6 hours, depending how strong you want the flavour.

If using baby potatoes, steam for about 10-15 minutes, until almost cooked.

Cut the vegetables into pieces big enough to put on the skewers (1″-2″). Toss lightly in olive oil and seasoning salt.

If using wooden skewers, soak well before adding meat and vegetables. I used metal skewers. Alternate meat and vegetables on the skewers.

Grill over medium heat for 12-15 minutes, until chicken is cooked through.

I served them with a side of roasted vegetables – you can never have too many veggies, after all!

These turned out super good, I especially liked the marinade – zingy!

Nutritional data (based 4 servings, 2 skewers each):

Calories: 202
Protein: 18 grams
Carbs: 17 grams
Fats: 6 grams

A rough cost estimate breaks out like this:

Olive Oil: $.25
Vinegar: $.25
Garlic: $.05
Basil: $.10
Fennel: $.05
Salt: $.02
Vegetables: $3.00
Chicken: $1.75
Total: $5.47
Per serving: $1.12

This made a nice summer meal, and would be great with most vegetables. The chicken could be substituted with beef, pork, shrimp or tofu, too!