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Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family. Here is my favorite whole berry cranberry sauce recipe – I always get asked to make it … now you can too.

Ingredients: One bag of fresh cranberries, sugar, Port Wine and a couple oranges

• Zest the peel of the oranges with a grater or zesting tool and set aside, then juice the oranges to make half a cup. Add Port to the OJ to make it a full cup of liquid.
• Place the one 1 cup fresh squeezed Orange Juice/Port mix in a saucepan.
• Add 3/4 cup of sugar and bring to a simmer.
• Rinse the cranberries and pick out the brown or soft ones.
• Add the cranberries to the hot OJ & Port and simmer for about 10 minutes. They will gently pop as they cook.
• At the end of ten minutes, remove from the heat, smash lightly with a potato masher so all the berries are at least cracked. Stir in the orange zest and cool.

Serve cool with dinner and goes well on crackers and lots of other things. This recipe can be easily doubled.

Happy Thanksgiving … may we all live in peace and be free from danger.

Just read an article on investing in Parking Garages from two folks who have some hard won personal experience.  AND YES …. they are the Cash Cow you might imagine them to be.

At the same time, Parking Garages are also a business with their own unique methods of driving profits. Here is one unique insight from Michael Tepper and CJ Follini at the Black Swan Blog …

Treat your parking garage as if it were a Hotel and focus on Presentation, Brand and Service.

Here are the rest of their 7 top tips:

Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a very cool little page on CNN/Money giving you the ability to see current Foreclosure and Unemployment rates for each state. Just mouse over your state and voila … nice.

This is a very basic screening for potential warm multifamily markets … ones with lower levels of both rates. AND remember, just because state level statistics are negative does not mean there are no local markets in the same state that show promise … all real estate is very, very local.

Here is the map … enjoy…

Despite what we have all heard in the National Press about the dismal state the US Retail sector is in  – what with the Recession, rising Unemployment and  – gasp – the American Consumer actually saving money again …

There are some bright spots in Retail as reported in a Globe Street article this week. And these could be the only bright spots in Retail Real Estate this year …  it is worth taking a peek at this list.

Overview:  “Though the International Council of Shopping Centers predicts that 150,000 stores will shutter this year, the association also noted that between 105,000 and 110,000 stores will open in 2009″

Here are some of the companies opening new stores this year – they fall in to several categories … Discount, Foreign Companies with their first US stores, services and food. Check it out … this is a very interesting list. Read the rest of this entry »