Make-Ahead Sour Cream Coffeecake

From America's Test Kitchen'd "The Best Make-Ahead Recipe" CookbookMakes two 9-inch cakes, each serving 6-8

Streusel

1/3 cup packed light brown sugar
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
4 Tablespoon unsalted butter, cut into 1/2" pieces and chilled
1 Tablespoon ground cinnamon
1 cup pecans, almonds, or walnuts, chopped

Cake

3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 Tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 3/4 cups sour cream
1 cup packed light brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
3 large eggs
7 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled.

1. For the Streusel: Using your fingers, mix the brown sugar, granulated sugar, flour, butter, and cinnamon together in a medium bowl until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Stir in the nuts and set aside.

2. For the cake: Coat two 9-inch cake pans with vegetable oils spray. Mix the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt together in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, whisk the sour cream, brown sugar, granulated sugar, eggs, and melted butter together until smooth. Gently whisk the egg mixture into the flour mixture until the batter looks smoothed and well combined but do NOT overmix.

3. Scrape the batter into the prepared pans and smooth the tops. Sprinkle the streusel evenly over the top of both cakes.

4. To Store: Wrap the pans tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate for up to 24 hours or freeze for up to 1 month. Do no thaw the frozen cakes before baking!

5. To serve: Adjust an oven rack to the middle position and heat the oven to 350 degrees. Unwrap the cakes and bake until the tops are golden and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out with just a few crumbs attached, 30 to 35 minutes if refrigerated or 40-45 minutes if frozen. Let the cakes cool on a wire rack for 15 minutes before serving.

To Serve Right Away: Bake the cakes as directed in step 5, reducing the baking time to 25 to 30 minutes.

VARIATIONS

Apricot-Orange: Stir 1 teaspoon grated orange zest into the flour mixture in step 2 and 1 cup chopped dried apricots into the finished batter in step 2.

Cranberry-Orange (dried cherries can be substituted for the cranberries). Stir 1 teaspoon grated orange zest into the flour mixture in step 2 and 1 cup dried cranberries into the finished batter in step 2.

Dean Schmelling's Beef Stew

This is a Crock Pot Recipe. It makes its own gravy, its own WONDERFUL gravy. When it is cooked, I portion it out into 1 or 2 cup servings, put it in ziplock bags and and freeze it. Then, when I want beef stew, I will cook veggies until tender (carrots, potatoes, English peas for example) and then add the cooked beef stew portion. It is also pretty good over a baked potato, topped with grated cheddar cheese.

This recipe makes great single servings. Just freeze it in snack-sized ziplocks!

____________________________________________

Trim 2-4 lbs chuck roast, removing as much fat as possible. Cut roast into cubes and place in crock pot.

Measure out 1/2 c flour. To that flour, add 1 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp pepper. Sprinkle flour mix over beef cubes. Stir to coat each piece with flour. It may take more than 1/2 cup of flour to effectively cover all the bits of beef. If so, just keep adding heaping tablespoons of flour until the beef looks "covered".

Combine 3 cubs beef broth, 1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce, 3 cloves garlic, 2 bay leaves. Add to crock pot.

Cook on high for 4-5 hours, or on low 8-10 hrs. If I am at home while this stew is cooking, I will stir it periodically, making sure that all the meat is submerged below the sauce.

Appraisals

People tend to only just barely have a vague notion of what it is that Appraisers do. It is common for people to confuse an appraisal with an inspection.. People commonly have an expectation that an appraisal is going to tell them the "True Market Value".

An appraisal is a report ordered by the lender. The focus and purpose of that report is to assure the lender that if they have to foreclose on the property they are not going to loose money on the resale of the foreclosed collateral.

"An appraisal is a valuation of the property. An appraiser renders an estimate of value as of a certain date under assumptions and conditions stated in the appraisal report. Typically, a buyer's lender requires an appraisal to verify that the loan is secured by property that is worth a certain amount. An appraisal is not the same as an inspection." From the Texas Association of Realtors "General Information and Notice to a Buyer".

Under recent changes, there is an entire new insulating administrative layer between the lender and the person doing the appraisal. Having that layer has not been the enormous headache that was originally predicted. It does, however, take longer to get an appraisal than it used to.

Annexation

"Annexation. If the property you buy is outside the limits of a municipality, you should be aware that the property may later be annexed by a nearby municipality. You may find information on the boundaries of nearby municipalities by contacting the municipalities directly" (from the TAR Form 1506 "General Information and Notice to a Buyer").

If a rural property is within a few miles of the city limits of a municipality, it may also be subject to limited amounts of regulation by that town because it is within the Extraterritorial Jurisdiction of that town. Again, check it out.

One of the unexpected consequences of Annexation is that a home may have been built when the area was rural and was subsequently annexed....but, it may not be completely connected to City Services such as sewer. I know an area of homes along a creek in Oak Cliff that were built with septic systems. As those systems fail, the homes owners are being required to tie into city sewer lines at a cost of thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars.