Only_Oli (The O_Zone)

This is definitely comfort food! (Please read again, this is not for anybody on a diet or anybody with high cholesterol…)

It is a traditional French Savoie dish made with Reblochon cheese.

I have not made this recipe many times yet so I am currently perfecting my preferred recipe. The current one is amazingly tasty but maybe a bit too runny or liquid. In any case it is absolutely amazing !

Ingredients :

• 8 to 10 Potatoes depending on size, 2 onions (I use red ones but you can use normal white one as well). Use buttery or creamy potatoes.

• Pancetta or Lardons
• A Reblochon, either a full one or a half one is ok
• A glass of white wine. (I actually do not use any)
• A mandoline (to cut the vegetables quickly)
• Black pepper, Nutmeg

Peel the Potatoes, then slice them approx 5mm thick. Put them in a bowl of water so that they do not go brown and also you loose a bit of the starch. I use the largest setting on my Japanese mandolin.

Slide the onions using the same setting.

Put the lardons and or Pancetta into a pan and lightly cook. Once they start taking a bit of colour and the water is evaporated and only the fat from the lardon is left in the pan, take the lardons out and put aside. Now cook the onions in the pan with the fat of the lardons.

Do not “FRY” the onions, just cook them gently so that they take a bit of colour, that is it. If you are using white wine, you should add it here and make sure that all the water of the wine evaporates or gets absorbed by the vegetables.

(If you are not using creamy potatoes, then you might need to cook them a little bit before putting them in the oven proof dish. Maybe boil the potatoes for 5 minutes max).

Take a oven proof dish and layer the potatoes, then the mixture of lardons and onions, poor a bit of cream on this. Season with a bit of black pepper. Then another layer of potattoes, then another layer of onions and lardons and a bit of cream.  Go easy on the cream, you just want the potatoes to stay creamy. You can then grate a bit of nutmeg.

Keep going until you have used all the onions and Lardons and finish with a layer of potatoes. Then take the Reblochon and cut it in half through its thickness so that you get 2 pieces with skin. Lay the reblochon on top of everything skin up. Sorry I forgot to take the picture of the final dish before going into the oven…

Cook in the oven at 160 degrees with a fan assisted oven. Check the cooking so that the top goes nice a brown and the potatoes are cooked through. Maybe 20/30 minutes.

Enjoy !

I played with my laser cutter today and got into the Xmas spirit…made a couple of fun things below.

1 – An overlay screen for my Raspberry Pi frame… Need to code some sort of animation to play behind it

2- Some name tags for the presents of 2015 Xmas at my parents…only a week to go now before we travel to see them.

Manu is playing the Xmas songs on the spotify and the garden is full of coloured lights.

Merry Christmas to all.

I built this last week. It is for my brother’s Xmas gift. It is a small game, where you need to put the pegs into the slots but the numbers cannot be connected to each-other if they are consecutive. It all looks simple, but when you start playing with it, it reveals it difficulty. Still need to finish it and find the solution….might need to code a small program to solve the conundrum. Will post here the code and final picture of solved problem when it is all finished.

I used, Inventor as usual and adobe illustrator for the lines and text.

Laser cut the whole thing in 3mm birch plywood.

Made the pegs from multiple layers of small 20mmX20mm square cuts. Laser engraved the top with numbers on one of the sets.

Made some sort of closing mechanism for the top lid to rest on the front of the box and is articulated enough to open fully. Used the usual tabs and slots to keep everything square when I glued it all together.

The whole thing fits onto a 60cmX40cm sheet of wood, so it would be a good project for schools to do the lasercut and the programming of the solution.

I finished it with Danish oil, “Canadian Cedar colour”. Made a small design logo as well…

Just 19 seconds of chillaxing…

When I look at this magazine, it reminds me of the days I used to play with my TRS-80 from Tandy…

You must visit this page if you want to get a bit nostalgic and code for a few minutes in BASIC !

Start with 2 Returns to the initial question marks ?

Then start coding !

If you can’t remember how to do it, read the manual…

The Raspberry foundation is doing some extraordinary work to bring computing and coding back into the mainstream and drive kids to like to code.

This $5 computer (yes $5 not $50 or $500), is simply a fantastic way to bring computing to everybody.

With the issue 40 of the MagPi magazine, the small computer is attached to the front page and comes for free…This is a £5.99 magazine !

The magazine itself is also a great example of a great teaching tool. You can follow page by page some examples of code etc… just perfect.

Did I say that the magazine can be downloaded for FREE from the foundation website. Essentially, if you can’t afford to buy the magazine (a kid with little pocket money), then you can still get the great content, if you can afford it, you buy the magazine and help teachers and educators to get the right training and equipment.

Needless to say, I subscribed.

I purchased some cardamom plant a few months ago and have managed to keep it alive. It is doing well although some of the leaves are yellowing. It might be because I left the plant outside too long into the very wet season. It is now in my garage for the winter. Initially, I had it straight under the hydroponic lights but it did not like that and now I have moved it a bit away from the light so that it is a bit protected from the power of the metal halide lamps.

I couple of months ago, I also split the main plant into 6 other plants. I have re-planted the little shoots into small pots but also put a couple of plants outside in a raised bed. I would like to see if the plants are better outside for the winter or within the garage under fluorescent lighting. (And the warmth of the propagator )

As I was doing some research on optimum lighting and heat setting etc…I realised that cardamom is actually a very valuable plant and the spices that it can produce are very expensive per weight. I have not had any pods yet, so will probably have to wait until next year for it. (Update : It actually takes 3 years before the plant will produce its first flowers and therefore pods. A bit more to wait then)

I recently donated a plant to my brother…a further proof that we are getting older and possibly wiser…?

Also need to start a cumin plant from seeds. Not sure if I can use the ones in my spice rack…must try.

I just changed the pedals on my mountain bike, I thought I would get something lighter to help me go further and go up those hills with more elegance.

I swapped the already light Haibike pedals for the lightest in the world !…it is almost  50g lighter…the equivalent of a pack of salt and pepper crisp…

Very pleased with the pedals but very disappointed that my uphill elegance has not improved at all. Maybe I should concentrate on taking the weight off me rather than off the bike.

We are all makers at heart, building something from scratch is so much more rewarding than purchasing from the Internet. With recent technology enhancement, machines that would have been only available for big companies with deep pockets can be purchased by the weekend hobbyists.

A couple of months ago, I purchased a digital sewing machine….yes I know….

I was planning to purchase a sewing machine to make some repairs on garden furniture chairs and potentially make some new covers for my living room sofa. I thought this would be a good winter project and purchased the various bits required. I discovered a new world of materials and techniques that I had not explored since I made my first kites with my mums “brother” sewing machine.

I decided to follow the theme of my hobby for digital manufacturing and purchased a computerised sewing machine from Janome.

As for many of the new technologies, there is a huge gap between the hardware capabilities and the available software to control it. For the machine I purchased, there is essentially no software included to create the embroidery. You can download freely designs that other people have made, or use a very basic on-machine fonts, but that is about it. Very frustrating when you come from a very open source world of 3D printing. Some of the digitising software can cost thousands of sterling. Simply ridiculous and essentially exploiting a niche market. The software is very average, using very old programming and extremely fragmented in terms of capabilities.

I am still exploring which software I want to use and have not done very much with the machine other than an oversized pencil pouch !!

Recently a friend of mine asked for some help with embroidery of a few designs on a couple of different material. I converted a few JPG files into the proper format and resized as required. I also noticed that the files were better imported if converted first into SVG format. I also reduced the number of colors to 2 (black and white) and ensured that the various paths for the sewing of the stitches was going to be ok. Most of the designs result in approximately 5000 to 10000 stiches, depending on the size of the stitches chosen. The designs take approximately 30 minutes to “print”. There is a little bit of finishing required to remove the “move” stitches, but overall I am pleased with the results.

I also tried to use the good old trusted laser, to see if it was possible to “Laser engrave” the material without setting fire to the material or the garage (!). A fine adjustment of 10% power was just right to make a print on the material without damaging the fiber of the material.

Here is a link to a short video of the whole process : link

Went to Belgium during the weekend, spend some long overdue quality time with the family.

On the Saturday we did a nice cycle ride (15.5km) in the countryside close to Corroy-le-Grand, which happens to be very very close to the Geographical centre of Belgium !

The 9 of us had a great time with a short “Aperitif” stop in Louvain-la-neuve ! Cecile took us to a small bar which is well known for being posh and the place to be seen by the local students, the Knockke Out. She gave the young barman a  hard time when there was no “Gueuze” for her husband or no “Affligem” for me on the beer menu…Well, it was still very nice to have a “Leffe Blonde” pression and a “Hoegaarden” white beer….

The kids even went to get us some very nice Vietnamese nems from a local “Baraque a Frites” !

Great quality time and great souvenirs for all.

A very easy and very delicious recipe for a savoury cake. This one is made with black olives and pancetta(bacon). The hardest thing in this recipe is the oven time. Making sure it is cooked but still moist. That is the secret.

Ingredients :

• 180g of Flour + 1 sachet of levure chimique  (11g or 2.5 Tea spoon of baking powder)
• 180g of Pancetta
• 180g of Black Olives
• 150g of grated gruyere
• 100ml of Olive Oil
• 100ml of Single Cream
• 3 eggs (I like to use duck eggs for this recipe)
• Salt (not too much if bacon is salty already), Pepper, Nut Meg

Preparation:

• Mix the flour and levure chimique in one container.
• Mix the Cream, Olive Oil and Eggs together and beat this a little.
• Pour this mix into the flour and mix well until smooth, then finally incorporate the olives, pancetta (diced) and gruyere.
• Butter and Flour a cake tin, put into the oven for 45 minutes at 180 degrees celsius. Monitor how brown the top gets and check on the back end of the cooking if it needs further cooking or if it done. Use a knife to go into the cake. If the cake comes out dry, the cake is cooked.

The surface and sides should be crispy and the inside will be moist. It will continue to cook a little once out of the oven. You can leave in the tin or take out depending how you like to cut it etc…

We just went on a nice Cycle and Running ride in south of France close to Lyon.