Microwave power

Our old microwave oven, made in January 1989, died this week. Luckily we had a spare*. It's a little cheap thing, but it works.

Wow does it work! I hadn't really thought about vacuum tubes like the magnetron losing power over time, but the little new one is like cooking over a volcano** compared to the old one cooking over a candle. Now we have to adjust all our recipes, things that took two minutes on the old oven to get warm are too hot at one minute on the new one!'

So, if you have a microwave older than the hills, you might want to consider a new one just to get back up to power (and save electricity).


* The spare: Back in 2005 we were driving to a convention and the hotel allowed food in the rooms and would even rent you a microwave...for $$ per day. We went to Costco and got one on sale for $49 and it worked great. We used it on a few trips, even in on an inverter off the car battery. It's been in the attic since the last trip, but is now back to work. We're giving it to a needy neighbor when we move.

** We actually have cooked over a volcano, in the Canary Islands. They dug a dry well down to where it's really hot and put a grate over it. Toss a chicken on the grate and you get a very nice dinner with no smoke flavor.

I always wondered how they dug that well and the foundation for the building next to it. Alas, the building is gone as the volcano toasted it a while after we left.