While you can make your own pumpkin puree, the easiest and most common thing to do when you need to bake a pumpkin pie (or make another dish that requires canned pumpkin) is to buy a can of pumpkin puree at the market and go from there. By and large, canned pumpkin is pretty good and is certainly both consistent and reliable – which homemade puree isn’t always. I prefer to use it when I’m developing a recipe because it gives me peace of mind to know that others will at least be starting with the same product as I am. Of course, not all canned pumpkin is created equal and Cook’s Illustrated held a taste test to see which canned squash was the best for pies. They tested Farmer’s Market Organic Canned Pumpkin, Libby’s Canned Pumpkin and One-Pie Canned Pumpkin.

Libby’s and One-Pie came in at a dead heat for first, with both having good consistencies and pumpkin flavor to them in a finished pumpkin pie. The Farmer’s Market brand didn’t come close, with testers noting an unpleasant “chalky” flavor and vegetal notes that they weren’t looking for in a pumpkin pie. It’s worth trying another brand when one you have isn’t quite delivering the result you want.

CI didn’t test too many brands, so if you have another favorite, leave a comment about it below this post so other can have a reference for what is – and what isn’t – a good canned pumpkin. I’ve been buying Trader Joe’s, which has a nice smooth consistency and a good pumpkin flavor, as well as a nice orange color (not too pale) that looks great in a finished pie slice.

I usually try to keep my opinions out the daily commentary. But I am really becoming irked by the press. One day they complain about our industry having foreclosure problems and the credit crisis here in the US and in the world. And then the next day they complain about the declining rate of mortgage approvals and fewer people qualifying for home loans in the US. And then on the third day they will have some story about how it makes sense for a borrower to walk away from their home loan obligation. Geez! (I’d read on the web that one guy, who was forcefully complaining about his parking ticket in front of his dad, got this response from the father: ” Just pay the parking ticket. Don’t be so outraged. You’re not a freedom fighter in the civil rights movement. You double parked.”)

Besides worrying about capital reserves and RESPA, the FHA has not been idle. The FHA imposed $512,000 in penalties on Lend America for allegedly violating FHA requirements, including failing to document borrowers’ income and creditworthiness, and for submitting false certifications. The move prohibits the company, owned by Ideal Mortgage Bankers, from making new mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration or issuing mortgage-backed securities insured by Ginnie Mae. No word yet on a counter action by Lend America, based in Long Island.

The parent company of AmTrust Bank (AmTrust Financial – Cleveland) has filed for bankruptcy,

more news on Amtrust, B of A Correspondent, Suntrust, Wells Fargo, Flagstar, Dubai, the economy, and TIGER WOODS JOKE COLLECTION  >>>  CLICK HERE

Pending home sales in October rose for the 9th consecutive month, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR) calculations. The index soared the most ever, undoubtedly due to both the depths it came from and the first homebuyer tax credit.

Just remember to take anything from the NAR with a few grains of salt.

Is it just us or are they passive-aggressively asking for more housing support?

—

[emphasis added]

The Pending Home Sales Index,* a forward-looking indicator based on contracts signed in October, increased 3.7 percent to 114.1 from 110.0 in September, and is 31.8 percent above October 2008 when it was 86.6. The rise from a year ago is the biggest annual increase ever recorded for the index, which is at the highest level since March 2006 when it was 115.2.

Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist, said home sales are experiencing a pendulum swing. “Keep in mind that housing had been underperforming over most of the past year. Based on the demographics of our growing population, existing-home sales should be in the range of 5.5 million to 6.0 million annually, but we were well below the 5-million mark before the home buyer tax credit stimulus,” he said. “This means the tax credit is helping unleash a pent-up demand from a large pool of financially qualified renters, much more than borrowing sales from the future.

The PHSI in the Northeast surged 19.9 percent to 100.2 in October and is 44.2 percent above a year ago. In the Midwest the index rose 11.6 percent to 109.6 and is 36.6 percent higher than October 2008. Pending home sales in the South increased 5.4 percent to an index of 115.4, which is 31.6 percent above a year ago. In the West the index fell 11.2 percent to 127.7 but is 21.9 percent above October 2008. Yun cautioned that home sales could dip in the months ahead. “The expanded tax credit has only been available for the past three weeks, but the time between when buyers start looking at homes until they close on a sale can take anywhere from three to five months. Given the lag time, we could see a temporary decline in closed existing-home sales from December until early spring when we get another surge, but the weak job market remains a major concern and could slow the recovery process.

“Still, as inventories continue to decline and balance is gradually restored between buyers and sellers, we should reach self-sustaining housing conditions and firming home prices in most areas around the middle of 2010. That would mean broad wealth stabilization for the vast number of middle-class families,” Yun said.

Check out the full release here.

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See Also:

• The National Association Of REALTORS Is Getting It All Wrong
• What Happened To REALTOR Larry Yun’s Endless Stream Of Optimism?
• Realtors Demand New $100 Billion Housing Subsidy

Filed under: Detroit Auto Show, Nissan, Porsche

For many auto enthusiasts, the 2009 North American International Auto Show was the official beginning of the US economic downturn. Nissan, Infiniti, Mitsubishi and Porsche didn’t even bother to show up for the once-prestigious event and Honda chose not to unveil any new product. A couple months back, the NAIAS organizers gave us some hope for the 2010 extravaganza when they said that the show would be better attended this time around. Well it appears that the show will at least be marginally better.

NAIAS co-chair Doug Fox has reportedly told the Detroit Free Press that at least 54 automakers will take part in the show this year, up four from 2009. Fox also estimates that a couple more automakers may decide to join in on the fun, but nothing is official at this time. Also exciting is news that both Porsche and Nissan will participate in this year’s show, though the extent of their presence isn’t very clear. We do know that Nissan will, at the very least, participate in the Detroit show’s 37,000-square-foot Electric Avenue exhibit, which features electric vehicles from 26 automakers. So far Porsche will only participate in a special event called “The Gallery,” which will be held for holders of the American Express Centurion card. The invitation-only event will be held at the MGM Grand on January 10.

While it’s nice to see that Porsche and Nissan are going to be active at NAIAS 2010, we’re a bit disappointed at the level of participation. At least the show will top the down year that was NAIAS 2009, but it looks like we may still be a ways away from the grandeur of shows gone by.

[Source: Detroit Free Press]

Better Than Before: 2010 NAIAS welcomes return of Nissan and Porsche, 54 carmakers total originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 01 Dec 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Citrus season is slowly rolling in on the East Coast, and we’re starting to see boxes and bags of bright orange clementines in the markets. Mostly we just eat them as they are, but we’ve rounded up eight ways to use them in recipes, cocktails, and, if you can resist the urge to snack, home decor.

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Yesterday we told you about a great source for beautiful clay pots, and some of you wondered what you would cook in such pots. Well, dry heirlooms beans are one wonderful thing to cook in a clay pot, and as you know, we are huge fans of beans. They’re complex and delicious, filling and inexpensive. But then, some of you also frequently email us and ask us how to cook them! Here’s one such email, from reader Jeff in Columbus, and a description of the absolutely dead easy, foolproof way we’ve been cooking our beans lately.

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What’s better than a picture?  Some video of course, and here we have a brief hands-on of the Samsung Omnia 2, seemingly taken inside a Verizon store, showing the device in action.

Besides the slow-loading widgets (must have been written in HTML) the user interface looks quite responsive, with applications popping into view without much delay.

The Omnia 2 is set to arrive any day now on Verizon, and should be for short while one of the best specified smartphones in US.

Are you planning to get one?  Let us know in the comments below.

Okay, it’s back to school for the kids today.  Unfortunately, we all overslept.  I awoke to a knock at my door.  My 17 year old daughter informed me that it was 7:00.  I stumbled out of bed and up the stairs to wake the boys.  My 11 & 12 year old boys got out of bed and fumbled for their clothes that they had set out the night before.  After a few mumbles they were dressed and headed out the door.  My daughter, on the other hand, wasn’t quite so amiable. 
High School for a teenage girls is like a fashion show to models.  There is something to be said for cleanliness but, some mistake cleanliness for perfection.  My daughter should have been born a Virgo.  She is a perfectionist.  She expects way too much of herself and those around her.  However, she doesn’t go overboard to the point that she feels better than everyone else.  She just knows what she likes and she strives to be the best that she can be.
Needless to say, she spent the next hour getting ready for school.  Once she was out of the shower, she spent the next 50 minutes blow drying her hair, making sure that every single strand of hair was absolutely straight (with the Chi hot iron I paid $140 for), make-up applied to perfection, jeans clean with  holes in just the right places, her pet bird fed and watered, book bag together, and whatever else it usually takes her 2 hours to do.  Hey, this is a record time for her.  Maybe she should wake up late every morning.  All of this just to go to school to learn. 
“School is not a fashion show.”  That is my mantra every morning.  But, alas, I waste my breath.  For my words fall on deaf ears.  Or, at least, half deaf ears.  The poor child has an ear infection in one ear and has lost some of her hearing.  Oh well, there’s always tomorrow.  I guess there’s no crime in wanting to look your best.  She gets excellent grades and looks good too.

Citi’s Tobias Levkovich shows how the market has sunk back to Panic levels, based on the firm’s proprietary Panic/Euphoria model.

For what it’s worth, the model is based on a collection of sentiment indicators including “NYSE short interest ratio, margin debt, Nasdaq daily volume as % of NYSE volume, a composite average of Investors Intelligence and the American Association of Individual Investors bullishness data, retail money funds, the put/call ratio, CRB futures index, gasoline prices and the ratio of price premiums in puts versus calls.”

As we’ve highlighted in the past, these black box models are best used by comparing them to themselves. Thus while the recent model reading shows a panic level based on Citi’s indicators, we can see that on a relative basis Citi’s indicator is well above where it was in March, and equal to a level of sentiment seen during 2005. So perhaps Citi’s Panic line needs to be adjusted downward slightly.

(Via Citi Investment Research, “The PULSE Monitor”, Tobias Levkovich, 30 November 2009)

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See Also:

• Citi’s New Chief Economist Thinks Citi Is Too Big
• Citi: The Commodity Collapse Could Be "Subprime Part II"
• Citi Snagged The Domain Finance.com

At a recent event in Buenos Aires, investment guru John Mauldin delivered an excellent presentation titled “Thoughts on the Continuing Crisis.”

Through a series of charts, he lays out his case that we are indeed entering a long, Japan-like period of deflation. Everywhere you look, you see undercapacity and lower monetary velocity, and more debt.

Click through for the full story >

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See Also:

• Developing World Goes Into V-Shape Mode
• The Most Ridiculous ETFs Of All Time (UNG, USO, UUP, DIG, DUG)
• SocGen: Prepare Yourself For The Worst Case Scenario!

You can read recipes and watch Food Network until you’re blue in the face, but improving your actual cooking skills and quality of your food is something that is best done one one step at a time, little bit-by little bit. Here to help is David Lebovitz who has made a top 10 list of things you can do to up your game in the kitchen.

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This post is part of the IT Innovation series, sponsored by Sun & Intel. Read more at ITInnovation.com.
Of course, the content of this post consists entirely of the thoughts and opinions of the author.

As many of our readers already know, we’ve been producing several topical conversations on a variety of subjects via the Insight Community, and we’d like to introduce our newly sponsored site, IT Innovation, brought to you by Sun Microsystems and Intel. (You may have missed the subtle new ‘IT Innovation’ link added to the top of our page.) First and foremost, the goal of this effort for us here at Techdirt is to create interesting and useful content for our readers in the realm of server hardware and datacenter management.

We’ll be covering trends in datacenters and skills for IT managers — and asking the Insight Community for its input on generating relevant insights for future conversations. And as with any natural conversation, we’re not 100% sure where the topics will lead because the ideas will develop and evolve as we discuss them. But we’ll start with current trends, as well as far off predictions, advice and tips for IT managers, business tools, and try to delve deeper into the subjects that resonate with the community participants. If you’re already a member of the Insight Community, you can contribute your thoughts on the datacenter upgrade process. If you’re not already a member, you can join now.

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Filed under: SUV, Government/Legal, Safety, Ford

According to The Detroit News, the Supreme Court has let stand a ruling that Ford Motor Company is at fault for a 2002 rollover crash involving a 1997 Ford Explorer and the Dearborn, MI-based automaker must pay $55 million in punitive damages. Benetta Buell-Wilson’s Explorer rolled over four-and-a-half times after she swerved to avoid debris. When the roof collapsed on her neck, it severed her spinal cord and left her paralyzed.

Ford unsuccessfully argued that it shouldn’t be punished due to the fact that the Explorer complied with federal safety standards when it was built. Buell-Wilson was originally awarded $369 million in damages, but a pair of California courts cut down the total value of damages to $82.6 million.

[Source: The Detroit News]

REPORT: Ford loses appeal in rollover case, must pay $55M originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dennis Gartman surely talks a good game and makes great T.V.

Yet his trading newsletter has always been pretty vague, and his trading record uncertain as a result.

Not anymore.

The Globe and Mail tears into Gartman’s horrible performance year to date, as measured by abysmal performance of his exchange-traded fund ‘Horizons AlphaPro Gartman ETF’.

Vox: The fund launch was well-timed, coming as it did just as stocks were about to start one of the greatest runs of all time. Mr. Gartman’s investors, though, are down. The units, sold to investors for $10 a few months ago, closed at $9.12 on Friday, giving the ETF a market cap of about $52.5-million.

Now, we have to be fair: For starters, about 50 cents of the purchase price was eaten up in underwriting fees. We can’t blame Mr. Gartman for that.

And the net asset value of the fund is, as of the most recent calculation, $9.35. So while investors are down about 9 per cent, Mr. Gartman’s picks have only cost them 3 per cent.

But the market is up 30 per cent since the fund launched. What’s up with that? Mr. Gartman didn’t get back to me, but the people at Horizons AlphaPro tell me the fund is intended to be market neutral, meaning it won’t move with the market. Why? Because it’s long and short, and supposedly constructed in such a way that the market’s performance has no net effect on the returns. The only thing that does have an effect, in theory, is the manager’s skill. It may be early days, but Mr. Gartman’s performance has been found wanting.

He’s expected to return between 6 and 12 per cent regardless of the market. Eight months in, he’s nowhere near that. And by the way, I don’t see any mention of market neutral in the prospectus, and I don’t recall Mr. Gartman being a market-neutral enthusiast, although he hedges many of his trades.

Read the whole Gartman take-down here.

(Via The Big Picture)

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Gartman: Here’s Why Credit Card Delinquencies Fell To 1.1%
• Gartman: Of Course Geithner Deserves Blame For The Bailouts
• Gartman: Want To "Fix" The Trade Deficit? Bring On A Full-Fledged Depression

Today is World Aids day and, as you would expect, many web companies are showing their support for the cause. Google didn’t go the usual route and sport a doodle to mark the occasion. Instead, it shows a message below the search box with a link to a Google.org page with more information. Twitter went even further by partnering with well-known organization (RED) and turned the site literally red. The organization also set up a Facebook page encouraging users to spread the info amongst their friends.
 
Of the three, Twitter is definitely the most involved dedicating the entire homepage to the campaign. The page has switched from its usual blue hues replacing them with the striking red color associated with the (RED) campaign. It only shows up when you’re not logged into the service but even if you don’t see the design you’re bound to notice the #red hashtag which flooded the service.

The hashtag is now the top trending topic on Twitter and the service is encouraging users to include it in their messages to spread the word. As an interesting touch, the text in the messages which use it will actually turn red, from the usual black, to make them stand out.

(RED) also set up the twitter.com/joinred account to provide more information to interested users and the account is already provin… (read more)

According to the National Retail Federation, retail sales over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend were $41.2 billion, up slightly from a year ago, while about 195 million consumers shopped, up from 172 million last year.

Meanwhile, Coremetrics says the average online shopper spent 35% more on Black Friday vs. a year ago, while robust sales were predicted for Cyber Monday.

Against that backdrop, you might expect Howard Davidowitz of Davidowitz & Associates to backtrack from some of the bearishness he’s professed on Tech Ticker (and elsewhere) in the past year. But you’d be wrong.

“The consumer is in worse shape since I was here last” in August, Davidowitz says, citing the following:

• Unemployment has exploded: “We’ve lost a ton of jobs since I was here last,” Davidowitz says, noting the “real” unemployment rate is 17.5%. “That’s an astounding number.”
• Housing continues to sink: “The consumers’ biggest asset is down trillions” in value while “foreclosures are exploding” and a huge percentage have negative equity — 23% according to CoreLogic.
• Record numbers of consumer bankruptcies: The American consumer has “never been further behind…never defaulted more” on mortgages, student loans, auto loans, and credit card bills, he says.
• Poverty on the Rise: One in eight Americans and one in four children are receiving food stamps, as The NYT reported this weekend.

“A lot of people were out on Black Friday — you’re always going to spend some money because it’s Christmas,” he says. “[But] the consumer continues to get dramatically worse.”

Davidowitz predicts “the noise will be taken out” about “strong” Black Friday sales in the coming weeks and a sobering reality will settle in: “People will look a stores closing and a rash of bankruptcies after Christmas. People will start to look at this and say ‘wow, this is terrible,’” he says.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Goldmanites Buying Handguns To Protect Against Angry Public (GS)
• Morgan Stanley: Here Comes A Brutal 2010

Filed under: Etc.

When it isn’t unusual to get into five or six different cars a month, you realize you spend a lot of time figuring out how, and how many ways, one can shift the gears in an automatic or double-clutch car. Where is the shifter? How many settings does the shifter have? How do I get into manual shift mode? Once there, how does it work? Are there paddle shifters as well? Do the paddle shifters move with the wheel or not? And so on…

Road & Track surveyed a number of automakers about how they set up their manual shifting modes. Some require you to push the lever forward to upshift, while for others that’s a downshift, and a couple demand you move the lever side-to-side. The 13 makers examined all have their reasons, the loose consensus being that the forward-for-downshift bunch is modeled after driving dynamics, the forward-for-upshift bunch based on intuitiveness and customer feedback.

At least two makers have two cars that use different shifting methods. And if not for Subaru, Audi, and Porsche there’d be a nice way to classify the forward-for-upshift crowd as being for buyers who aren’t into sporting driving. As far as we’re concerned, forward should be for downshifts, and single-function paddles should be mounted on the wheel, not the column. But you can tell us what you think in the comments.

[Source: Road & Track]

Push Me, Pull You: R&T investigates the comings and goings of gear changes originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 01 Dec 2009 08:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you live in California, Florida, Hawaii, Texas, or Arizona, you might be seeing these rosy berries in backyards, parks, and farmers’ markets. Did you know they’re identical or very similar to the expensive pink peppercorns sold commercially?

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