Budget Friendly Meal Ideas – Lazy Cabbage Rolls

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These weekly recipes have been well received so far, so for now I’m going to keep posting them. I originally posted this recipe in June 2011 on my health & fitness blog.

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!

The Opportunity Cost of Housing Decisions

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This post was inspired by Daisy’s post on Out of Control Transportation Costs, and is a follow up to the post I wrote yesterday where I wondered how much of your house you actually use. Housing costs can be one of the biggest line items in any budget. While I don’t feel our housing costs are out of control, I will admit to being a little boggled at the value of our house and the size of our mortgages – I never, ever thought I’d own a house with a price over $400,000, and our monthly mortgage (PIT) is well over $2,000 per month. Let’s face it – PIT is just the tip of the housing cost iceberg, too.

So how do our monthly housing costs break down?

PIT $2,441.40
House Insurance $82.53
Mortgage Life Insurance $33.13
Utilities (heat, lights) $228.00
Water $65.00
Total $2,850.06

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.

PIT $1,500.59
House Insurance $59.65
Mortgage Life Insurance $33.63
Utilities (heat, lights) $370.00
Water $65.00
Total $2,028.87

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.

 

How Much of Your House Do You Use?

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Recently my parents were visiting, and we got to talking about the condominium that friends of theirs had purchased about an hour away from the city we live in. Although it is nice, and new, my parents find it a little cramped – it is a 2 bedroom unit with about 1000 square feet of indoor living space. My parents purchased a new 1450 square foot 3 bedroom mobile home for their retirement home a couple of years ago, then built a 1.5 car garage beside it (which is mostly used for storage).

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.

 

 

Weekly Link Love – September 7, 2012

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Today is my son’s 16th birthday, and THAT makes me feel old. He’s a good kid and we love him, but there is no way on earth I’m old enough to have a 16 year old son! We’ll be celebrating with family today, my mom’s making a cake and we’re making roast beef with homemade Yorkshire pudding. I’ve ordered a couple of T-shirts for him that he wanted, and am buying him a video game upgrade – all he really wants. It should be fun. In the mean time, I’m posting just a few links I’ve discovered this week – while many PF bloggers were off at FINCON12, I’ve been swamped with leaving my old job, so if the list is sparse I apologize!

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. :P (He’s 13 now – he survived fine).

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