How much sugar do you take with your ... pasta?

I do not have time to cook during the week. I cook on weekends and freeze batches of family dinners (usually soups). 

On the rare occasions when my weekend operation is derailed, I prepare emergency meals. One of the staples under such circumstances is pasta dinner. 

We used to buy the regular pasta; however, after we realized how dietary fiber boosts the overall health, we started buying whole-wheat pasta whenever it was on sale (healthy choices in the supermarket usually have a discouraging price range). 

Whole-wheat pasta is great, but not when combined with the commercially available pasta sauce. Why? 

Because ½ cup pasta sauce has up to 12 grams of sugar, salt up to 590 mg, soybean oil, and other unsavory ingredients.

Let us “digest” this information. First, usually people put 1 cup or more rather than ½ cup of pasta sauce on their pasta. Second, one teaspoon of sugar is 4 grams. Therefore, if you are serving the high-sugar pasta sauce and you use a cup of it, this is equivalent to sprinkling your pasta with 6 teaspoons of sugar! 

SUGAR = POISON, just watch Sugar: the bitter truth.

Stop buying pasta sauce and go basic.

Here is my quick concoction for pasta sauce without any undesired ingredients lurking in it. 


Pasta sauce - your way
 
You need:
1 can of any tomatoes – check the ingredient list, there  should not be any added sugar
1 Tbsp olive oil
2 garlic cloves (crushed or chopped)
Spices of your preference: hot pepper flakes, savory, oregano, basil, etc. I love winter savory in my sauce.
 
Instructions:
Soften the garlic in the oil for a few seconds, and add the tomatoes. Stir in the spices and warm up to the desired temperature. Serve! No sugar, and the salt could be controlled (I usually do not add salt, if the can of tomatoes already has some).

Once you start with the basic sauce, you may acquire taste for experimenting with additions to it. You could soften also some chopped onion before adding the tomatoes to the pot. 
The fiber intake could be increased by adding a few veggies and even some cooked beans to the sauce. 

Where Is Spring

Last year's (2016) March garden. When would 2017 surprise me with the same delights?

Last year at this time, my garden was full of life. The pictures above were taken for Easter 2016, which was on March 27.

This year, the garden just started to emerge from under the three feet of snow that fell upon us two weeks ago. 

As the snow starts to recede, I am hopeful that soon the garden will be full of color. It is the end of March after all, the sun has its obligation to warm up the muddy grounds, evaporate the icy pools of water, and coax the spring bulbs into activity. 

Here, in northeast U.S., this coming week we will see the temperatures a bit more Spring-like (I mean above freezing). 

This past summer, on each Saturday afternoon the mailman was passing me in the garden weeding, digging, and cleaning. So, one day he stopped and asked what I did in the middle of winter when I could not be outside gardening. 

"I go bonkers", was my reply.  Yep, I am almost there, bonkers. I need the garden to recover my sanity again. There has been so much turmoil at work that I need a place/space that is as removed as possible from the tragedies of my job.

No-garden weekends for me a full of cleaning, food shopping, cooking and experimenting in the kitchen, blogging a bit and reading good books. This past weekend I re-tried my recipe for high-fiber brownies with less chocolate chips added. The recipe has no added sugar except for the one in the chips, so I used 3/4 of a cup of chocolate chips, rather than 1 cup, and the brownies were still excellent. 

Later today, I will try a simple and cheap recipe for crackers. I will let you know, if the experiment succeeds.

I also will look at some websites I discovered yesterday. French country cottage was one of them. I will have plenty of material to explore - the blog started in 2010!

Happy Sunday!

Weekend cooking: egg whites with feta cheese

This weekend I still have plenty of frozen food for the coming work week. Therefore, I am cooking only for Saturday and Sunday, just to break the monotony of soups during the work week.

For lunch I will make eggs whites with feta cheese dish. It is quick and delicious.

Egg whites and feta cheese

You need:
1-2 Tbsp of olive oil
1 carton egg whites (16 oz)
1 or 2 large sweet peppers (I bought an orange one on sale today!)
a few whole eggs (if you are not worried about cholesterol)
a cup of crumbled feta cheese (or more, I LOVE feta!)
1 large sweet onion (diced)
1 or 2 cloves of garlic, crushed
hot pepper flakes (optional)

Instructions:
Soften the onion in the oil. Add the diced pepper and garlic, soften these before adding the egg whites (and a few beaten whole eggs, if you like). Mix until the eggs are cooked. Add any spices of choice and turn off the heat. Wait a few minutes and then mix in the crumbled feta cheese. The indicated ingredients yield 5 - 6 portions. (I use one 16-oz carton of egg whites and 2 whole eggs.)

The dish could be complemented by a drink of plain yogurt diluted with water and a portion of cucumber salad with vinegar, olive oil, salt and dill.

As always, I encourage you to try variations of this recipe. Instead of peppers, you could use diced tomatoes, green beans, broccoli, corn, zucchini, and more.

Snowy dreams

I am crazy about gardens. 

Just thinking about a garden project and flowers relaxes me and makes me happy. Therefore, in the midst of my current blues caused by a three-foot snow cover, I look for YouTube garden shows that carry me into my dreamland, where I feel my best.

I love the Gardener's World (British) series; many of these are on YouTube.

More than a year ago I also discovered Big Dreams Small Spaces, another British show on gardening. I watched all episodes I could find, but then the show disappeared for the usual copyright reasons.

Recently, I was happy to find out that some episodes were back on YouTube.

Each episode is the story of two gardens. The stories follow the process of transforming boring and abandoned lawns into magical worlds of flowers. 

Monty Don is the leading gardener in both shows. He is the guardian of a fairy-like world of amazing flower beauty, plant secrets and nature poetry. 

Do you like fairy tales? If you do, Monty Don can teach you new fairy tales.

My last trip to the dollar store yielded more seeds

What is my investment strategy

What is my investment strategy?  I have none. I have no formal financial education - I am a cancer researcher! So, I gobble up any piece of reasonable advice on my favorite personal finance blogs. 

Let me give you an example of how erratic my financial decisions are.

It was just yesterday when I posted my decision that at present, I would not buy anything else but bonds in the pre-tax account, and pile up cash with whatever is left from my paycheck.

The bonds (VBTLX in my pre-tax portfolio) are still a target, at least until I meet our HR-provided financial advisor (I will be meeting him soon). So, stay tuned for this "change of heart".

The cash, however, is another story. I just deployed some of it to the stock market. Again.

What made me change my mind? 

Today I found an interesting blog, Lyn Alden. I was reading her post 3 Bubbles Growing in the US Economy and the author's analysis of what caves the U.S. middle class and what our investment options are, resonated with me.
 
Read the post, and you will find out in detail what three investment options Lyn proposes. From the three possibilities, I do not have cash-secured puts to sell (I did not even know that such existed 🙍), and I would not invest abroad these days (I am acquainted with the volatility of the situation abroad). So, two of the solutions provided in the post were of no interest to me.
 
However, the third option of buying real estate and REITs was of interest. I have been accumulating VNQ shares since last year, and the last time I bought some was this past summer, when the ETF's price was at its peak ( > $90). 

Ever since the VNQ price started going down, I have been considering another investment in the ETF.  So, Lyn Alden’s post was the final push I needed to plunge another $3,000 into VNQ. 

I did put a VNQ trade order, but my "buy" price is lower than the current price, so it may take some time for the order to be executed. In other words, my erratic financial decision might be overturned if I do not get the desired price.
 
What are your solutions in dealing with the overheated market?

P.S. I am going back to Lyn's blog to read all her long-long posts. 

A weekend of no cooking

I have deposited so many jars of frozen soup in my freezer that this weekend I am not cooking.

Since the weather is dismal, I cannot enjoy my free time by walking and gardening (in March "gardening" in zone 5, U.S., means sprucing up and cleaning the yard). The garden is in fact covered by three feet of snow.

So, I have plenty of time to surf the net and I freshen up on my financial/investment/frugality knowledge by visiting my favorite blogs and discovering new ones.

I have previously written about a few financial independence blogs that I always read (here, here, and here), but since then I have discovered many others that I love reading.

Here are a few of these new (to me) blogs:

Wallet Hacks
The Green Swan
Tawcan
Slowly Sipping Coffee
Our Next Life
Retire Before Dad
Retire by 40
Freedom Is Groovy

This morning I was reading the latest post of Wallet Hacks on CAPE as a measure of whether the stock market is over-priced.  (By the way, find more on CAPE and other neat info here).

I was happy to find out that the recent changes I made with my employer-sponsored retirement portfolio might make sense. I do not have a financial advisor, so validating my financial behavior is a bit difficult since I do not trust myself too much. Anyway, back in December 2016 I got way too stressed by the stock market going up and up, and decided that I need to switch most of my assets in my major pre-tax investment account to bonds.  My asset allocation back then was 80% in equities, 10% in real estate, and 10% in bonds. 

In the early days of January 2017 I did the reshuffling. Currently, my asset allocation reads:

Equities: 34.10%
Fixed income: 65.90%

Also, all my automatic contributions from my salary are set to buy only bonds, and in particular, VBTLX.

I also have a small after-tax investment account with a discount brokerage company. I did a tremendous overhaul of the account last year by selling some "mistakes" acquired more than eight years ago and also cashing on some lucky strikes. The sold stocks were all stocks in individual companies that paid no or low dividends.  My current after-tax portfolio is oriented to dividend stocks only, and since I hate picking companies, in addition to 10 or more individual companies, I started buying ETFs for dividends (VNQ, VYM, VTI). I am not planning on buying more of these ETFs this year due to the current exorbitant prices.

Anyway, when I take all my investments into account, the allocation is close to 1:1 between equities and bonds. This brings me some peace of mind, since my job is highly unstable, I am old (not revealing yet how old...) and I need to protect my retirement assets in case I need them in 5 -10 years from now. None of this reasoning applies to younger than me people  - if your horizon is more than 10 years of investing, go for equities.

A nifty tool that allows you to play different allocations for your retirement is the Vanguard retirement nest egg calculator.

Another switch in my financial plans is to pile up some cash this year.  So, whatever is left after all my taxes and automatic deductions to the employer-sponsored retirement account (investing in VBTLX now), I will stash into an online savings account with 0.75% interest rate. I may need this cash, if my job suddenly disappears and I am still not qualified to access the pre-tax retirement money without penalty.  In case of emergency, I also do not want to start selling my small after-tax portfolio.  After I reach my desired number of $ in cash, if the CAPE is still below 30, I may go back to buying VYM.

Anyway, I digressed. 

I was about to tell you what my favorite Internet sites on personal finances are. 

In addition to the sites mentioned above, I am currently reading two Europe-based bloggers:

The Frugal Cottage 
From cents to retirement 

Finally, the sites I visit almost every week are:

Financial Samurai
Fifighter
Digital Nomad Quest

The authors of all these blogs are way much younger than me, but I guess by reading them I relive my life in a different way. Only if I could start my life again, but with the financial knowledge I have today!

I hope it is not too late for you.