Bill Wishon's News and Views

I like to cook and I read a lot of tips and see a lot of interesting gadgets.  But by far the best tip lately was to peel ginger with a spoon.  If you were like me you are using a paring knife to cut the skin off of ginger.  It’s challenging, sometimes wasteful if you go for speed vs. accuracy around all the little corners and sometimes dangerous.  Stop using a knife and start using a spoon.  With the concave side of the spoon facing the skin just drag the tip of the spoon across the skin starting from an edge and it comes right off.  Best of all just the thin skin comes off and it leaves all of the ginger, plus it’s easy to get into those tight spaces.

Here’s one of many videos showing the technique : http://youtu.be/-boCCGtwggk

The best album I heard in 2011 was High Violet by The National.

The first song I heard of theirs was Fake Empire of a previous album, while I like that album okay when I heard this one it was like they had struck a chord I hadn’t heard before.  The combination of the lead singer’s voice with the poetic / non-sensical lyrics and a simple but layered musical sound is really unique.  That combined with the fact that I can put this on heavy rotation and not get tired of it, makes this my pick for best album of 2011.

Today I finished building two custom raised planter boxes.  They turned out really cool so I figured I’d post an article detailing how I made them in case anyone else is searching for how to build these things.

I consider myself moderately handy and have a few tools laying around, but nothing particularly fancy.  This project was a big project for me but it was fun to do and worth it to get the custom fit I needed.  The full bill of materials was a few bucks less than $300 for both boxes and it took me most of two weekend days.

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The best new album I heard this year is Black Sands by Bonobo.

I first came across this album and artist from a music blog I follow called ScissorKick around memorial day and it’s been in my rotation ever since.   Black Sands is a sexy downtempo / chillout music that has a mix of electronic and live instrument sounds.