Household Ingredients
Process
During microscopic research, I first prepare the specimen, of course (which, lately, have been household ingredients), then place my camera (it's an Iphone 12 usually) on the ocular, and start taking pictures. I use 40 times and 100 times magnification generally, and rarely do I use 400 times mag. Having discovered image stitching as of lately, I've started taking pictures from left-to-right, top-to-bottom, right-to-left, then repeat (I'll get to this much later).
In this case, I've marked the slide with a red marker, so I know not to get too far with the imaging process (I'll get to it in a bit).
Cocoa under microscope afar, with red marker of 3 cms distance
When I am interested of how a solid, non-transparent specimen looks like, I just place my shiny table lamp right next to the microscope, and point it towards the specimen, like pic related.
For taking pictures through the oculars, I use a phone adapter to easily fit my Iphone 12 on the ocular. Nicely aligned, I usually start taking pictures of the specimen with 5 second intervals, going from left to right, top to bottom, right to left, and then repeat. This process is the prerequisite for image stitching. As of currently, I have no knowledge over a better technique, this is how I've done it so far.
If over a hundred, and I'd even say, if over 70-80 images are taken of one specimen, then the stitching process can become very very tedious, so I tend to avoid that, and focus on smaller specimens.
Having spent many hours figuring out how this image stitching thing works, I've found an awesome piece of tool, called Hugin. With Hugin, your computer automatically stitches together dozens of pictures into one single picture. You don't even have to do it manually, the computer does it for you (well, for the most part. If things go south, you have to manually place "control points" inbetween pictures.)
Image processing, via Hugin (awesome tool)
Above can be seen Hugin, and how it stitches many pictures together. It's main purpose, I think, is to create panorama pictures. It glues the images on a sphere, and produces the final image from there.
Stitching is used a lot in astronomy, too. When you look at pictures of nebulas, clusters, etc. then you might observe black bars at any side of the pictures. That is, because, that picture was stitched into one from many others.
Ingredients
Flour
The major components of wheat flour are protein (approximately 10%-12%), starch (approximately 70–75%), and the minor components are polysaccharides (approximately 2-3%) and lipids (approximately 2%).
Polysaccharides are carbohydrates basically.
Sugar
The white stuff we know as sugar is sucrose, a molecule composed of 12 atoms of carbon, 22 atoms of hydrogen, and 11 atoms of oxygen. It's molecular formula is C12H22O11. Sugar is also a carbohydrate. Sucrose is actually two simpler sugars stuck together: fructose and glucose.
If we look closely at a sugar under a microscope, we could be quick to say that sugar crystals look like cubes - which is true - but they aren't exactly cubes. They have oblong and slanted ends.
Here, we may see it from closer.
Salt
Commonly known as edible salt; sodioum chloride is an ionic compound with the chemical formula NaCl, and it represents a one-to-one ratio of sodium and chlorine ions.
Solid, hard and brittle types of salts (those salts that are composed of small ions, thus having high melting and boiling points) are almost always electrically insulating, but when melted or dissolved they become highly conductive, because the ions become mobile.
Coffee Bean
The main constituents of coffee are caffeine, tannin, fixed oil, carbohydrates, and proteins. It contains 2–3% caffeine, 3–5% tannins, 13% proteins, and 10–15% fixed oils. In the seeds, caffeine is present as a salt of chlorogenic acid (CGA). Also it contains oil and wax.
Spice Mix
Spice mix has an eerily similar crystlline structure, almost as if it was sugar. That is, because many solid substances, such as salts and certain seasoning mixes form into crystals, when in solid form.
Both sugar (sucrose) and salt (sodium chloride), which is a main component in spice mixes, organize into crystalline structures!
Cocoa
Cacao beans are composed of lipid fraction, approximately 50%, mainly constituted by neutral lipids, with a predominant fraction of triglyceride molecules.
Natural cocoa powder is extracted with the broma process where after the cocoa fats have been removed from the chocolate nibs, the remaining dry cocoa beans are ground into cocoa powder. Natural cocoa powder has a light-brown color and an extractable pH of 5.3 to 5.8.
Natural cocoa is often paired in recipes with baking soda!