I made an end-grain cutting board, and it’s about the coolest thing. It’s 1 3/4" thick and made from white maple. I’ll take you through the steps I followed. I’ve been a metal guy for years now. I love welding, I love machining, but recently I discovered that glued wood joints can be far stronger than I ever thought. We kinda needed a second cutting board, so I watched a few videos and read a few guides and decided I could probably build one.

I saw a Kickstarter for a cold brew coffee device today, and I started reading about it. Cold Brew is supposed to taste different from your traditional hot brews – it gets less of the acidic flavors than traditionally brewed coffee, so you wind up with a smoother beverage. Also, cold brew techniques produce a coffee concentrate that you’re supposed to dilute, and the idea of mixing up 50/50 cold brew and milk is interesting.

It bothered me that the spices in the kitchen were out of order. So, I sorted them using my favorite sorting algorithm, Mergesort. My cats helped.

I started with an un-ordered list of spices.

Then I started to divide the list up into smaller lists. Panther helped. 31 elements became 15 and 16. Then 7, 8, 8, 8. Then 3, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4. Then 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2

In this post, I started making box fan beef jerky. If you can’t remember where I was when I left off, go take a peek. Okay, so. The meat sat in the marinade overnight, and come morning I loaded it onto a 20" by 20" HVAC filter, courtesy of The Home Depot.

The cats were very interested.

I assembled the filters and strapped them to the fan.

I realized this morning that I’m about six months late in changing my air conditioner filter. I was in Home Depot, and I thought, “You know what goes really well with air filters? Beef jerky!” That’s right, I’m an unabashed Alton Brown fan. I saw this episode of Good Eats a few years ago, and I occasionally think, “Huh, I could do that.” Well, I bought three of the cheapest 20x20 filters and 1.

I am the proud owner of a Lodge 10" Cast Iron Skillet. I bought it at the Lodge Factory Store in Tennessee for, like, $12 because of a small blemish. I’d heard about making pizza in a cast iron skillet, and tonight, I thought, why not? I largely used this guy’s recipe (minus the part where he made his own dough and sauce. Maybe later.): http://www.macheesmo.com/2011/03/cast-iron-pizza/ One trip to Whole Foods later, and I had some Ingredients!