A favourite when we go to France. And it’s pancake day!
Ingredients (pancakes)
80g buckwheat flour
1 egg
250 ml milk
pinch of salt
Mix flour, egg and salt in a bowl. Once mixed, leave to stand for at least 30 minutes. Overnight in a fridge is supposed to be better.
When it’s time, put a blob of butter in a frying pan. Once it’s bubbling add enough batter to cover the pan and fry until the top is almost solid. Then flip and continue to fry until the bottom is solid.
We had buckwheat flour left over from youngest daughter’s Food Tech last month. And an egg! Currently a luxury in the USA. Quite a thick batter (not that you can tell). If I was working I’d do some rheology and a design of experiments on this and determine the ideal ratio of flour, egg and milk. But I’m not working, which is why I’m doing this nonsense.
In the end, they were OK. We had them with baked salmon (from frozen – salt, chili flakes and frozen onions, bake 30 minutes at 180 C) and corn on the cob (butter and salt, wrap in foil, bake with the salmon).
I’ve been working with 3D design for about two years. As a pharmaceutical scientist, I’ve been keeping track of possibilities in 3D printing tablets and other dosage forms. There’s been some interesting recent work on this and in custom design of arm casts. At my last job, we bought an Ender 3 Pro in early ’23 and set about finding uses for it.
Ender 3D printer. This isn’t the exact one we bought.
We used it to design all sorts of things – new funnels, inserts for spectrophotometers, toroidal propellers and flexible substrates for rheology testing. But I kept seeing Blender being mentioned when I looked on YouTube for help with 3D design. But I thought Blender was scary. Just look at it!
Blender window as it opens.
There’s loads of stuff on there! And that’s just one window! Sculpting? UV Editing? Eh?
But it is supposed to be a good program to learn 3d design, animation and simulations. I’d also had an idea to make a 3d print of a SEM image I took some years ago of a fractured oil droplet.
SEM image of a fractured oil droplet. I spent over 20 years studying these things.
This sort of thing was beyond the scope of TinkerCAD, but it turned out it was (relatively) simple in Blender. Well, I followed a tutorial on how to add things at random over a surface. I needed this because other images we took showed that there’s bumps all over the surface of the droplets. So with a knobbly hemisphere generated in Blender, I used TinkerCAD to add the rock-like frozen fractured oil interior. Then it was a matter of slicing and printing.
Easy.
I’d made a doughnut in September following a YouTube course (see below), which as OK I suppose.
A doughnut made in Blender. Looks delicious!
After faffing around a bit, I decided to give Grant Abbitt’s Low Poly Well a try. I chose this because Grant is an excellent tutor. He’s clear, doesn’t skip over bits (no ‘draw the rest of the owl’ nonsense) and has been using Blender for 20 years. He’s also English, so he says ‘zed’, rather than ‘zee’.
So I’m going to see how the low poly well goes. This will be under ‘Blender’ in this blog.
Grim up North Heath 