I did this last weekend. I still scraped the corn after it cooled a bit, just because it seemed like you were throwing away a lot of corn-infused liquids and solids (plus, well, habit). After using a stick blender on it, the texture sort of reminded me of the potato/leek base you make for vichysoisse, so I actually…

Having done it both ways, I find it is easier to just mount a spacer at the bottom of the cabinet (to keep it co-planar with the wall) and use some molding/end panel to cover up the gap (one side is usually flush to a wall anyway, and since I usually do face frames, it is easy to do a side panel that doesn’t look…

Cocaine.

This seems like a huge generality. I know C level types that work from waking up at 5AM to when they go to bed at 2AM—even their entertainment and meals all seem to involve business meetings—and yet they remain sharp as a tack. For my part, I bill by the hour. So my productivity is the time I work, and a loss of…

This is one instance where I’ve bought shit from Harbor Freight and been OK with the result—I’ve got their retractable air hose in my garage. I think I bought my retractable power cord from Grizzly.com, however. At least with respect to the air hose, it is pretty heavy and you occasionally have to pull on it hard—you…

They are kind of critical if you want good results smoking or roasting meat as well.

Chamber Vacuum Sealer. If everything in my kitchen were stolen and I had to repurchase everything, there’s an awful lot I’d never buy again (I don’t really need 90% of my knife collection). But one thing I’d absolutely rush out and buy tomorrow is my Minipack MVS20. Horribly expensive. Loud. Eyesore. But absolutely…

Microplane Grater. No substitute in my book for microplane—the smaller size is great for everything from hard parmiggiano to grating garlic or ginger.

Good, Accurate Thermometer. I favor the Thermoworks products—their thermopen is consistently well rated. Their accuracy and speed can’t be understated. And if you don’t think speed is relevant, watch how fast your caramel will turn into charcoal.

Kitchen Scale. If you bake, convert to weighing things. Soooo much easier to dump, zero tare, dump, zero tare, etc.

Silicone plastic spatula(s). I like the Mastrad all silicone ones—keep several thick, several thin, and several “spoontulas” around. I don’t like the wood handle ones where the handle seems to come out of the head—strikes me as a nasty breeding ground for bacteria.

I like the generic SS amco tongs in 12” and 9”.

I’ve given up buying most small tools on CL—too much crap, too high asking prices, and too many stolen goods being fenced in my area. I still use CL for higher end gear—you can usually tell if a seller is someone who legitimately acquired a Lie Nielsen No. 7 plane based on a brief talk with them about plane use—and…

There are a lot of practices I’ll call out as dishonest, but this isn’t one of them. Part of what Craftsman sold was a transferrable, lifetime warranty. A warranty isn’t free, it is something the company factored into the sales price of the item when they decided to sell it that way. The economist side of me says that…

I’ve always liked the chart that came with my Polyscience SVP:

Old Bay. Great on seafood, obviously. But also on pizza. Eggs. Everything. Takes me back to walking past the old McCormack factory on the way to the Inner Harbor in Baltimore.

French cleats for shop cabinets are awesome. Makes reconfiguration dead simple...

This kind of made me want to rip my eyeballs out. While I understand the basic if-you-use-your-tools-mainly-in-the-shop-the-blowmolded-case-just-takes-up-space idea, there are some very fundamental problems in my book:

My perspective on drill presses is slightly different. Frankly, while I have a 17” DP, it didn’t come into my shop until after most of the other stationary equipment and it isn’t something I tend to use a lot. In my book, a DP excels for two things—getting holes that are really orthogonal to a surface and repetitive…

I guess I don’t see the point of handheld router CNC. Creates a lot of complexity and ways the accuracy can be thrown off by having to deal with an arbitrary object in space. If I’m going the CNC route, I’d just slap it on a ShopBot CNC router table where I can control absolute position a lot more accurately.