Microwave + grill

Our microwave oven plate was not revolving, so I thought that it was time to replace it with a more modern microwave oven. The tendency these days is to have a microwave and a grill combined in one device and so this is what we bought last week ago. The grilling function intrigued me: the oven comes with a grilling rack that of course is made of metal, and I wondered how such a rack could work in a microwave oven, where metal is a strict no-no.

One can use the grill function on its own, which is what I did yesterday when grilling fish for lunch. The grilling element is in the 'roof' of the oven and can just about be seen in the picture on the left. I covered the top of the grilling rack with aluminium foil, both to prevent leakage from the fish (and the plate at the bottom is meant to catch any leakage that escapes the foil) and to help cook the other side of the fish. 

This works reasonably well; when comparing it to cooking the fish in the oven, there doesn't seem to be much difference. I grilled for 14 minutes as opposed to 15 minutes in the oven, but I could just as easily cut a minute from the oven time with little change. I assume that the microwave oven uses less electricity than the oven, but otherwise things are the same. I suspect that because of the aluminium foil, the fish didn't have 'grill lines' on it but that's purely aesthetic and doesn't affect the taste.

I wonder about the possibility of 'microwaving' and grilling simultaneously; obviously this would be without the frame and foil, but in such a scenario, the food would be relatively far from the grilling element. Microwave ovens work by stimulating water molecules in the food to revolve at speed; this causes them to heat up and it is this heat that cooks the food. Such ovens 'cook from the inside out', which is why the outside of microwave cooked food looks uncooked, whereas grilling (and all other kinds of cooking) cook 'from the outside in', which is why the outside layers of something can be hot and the inside cool.

According to a thread on Reddit, After a lot of research and asking and carefully reading the manual, I found that in combi mode the maximum power it uses for microwave is 440 watt (in microwave mode it can reach 1200 watt). So I guess as it is relatively low power and the fact that the included metal rack has insulated legs it is safe to be used in low power. 

So what's the point? I am not convinced by this explanation.

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
455	26/02/2012	Refactoring	Programming, Delphi
814	26/02/2015	Assigning numerical values	DBA
1012	26/02/2017	More thoughts about my new doctoral topic	ERP, DBA
1113	26/02/2018	DBA news	DBA
1474	26/02/2022	Welcome to the urologist	Health
1475	26/02/2022	The power of regret and a proto-song	Psychology, Song writing, Non-fiction books

Trump

There is a huge discrepancy in the way that USA President Trump is regarded in his own country and how he is regarded in Israel.

For many Israelis, he is extremely popular¹, albeit unpredictable, although that unpredictability may help his popularity. He is the man who managed to return the last of the Israeli hostages after the 7 October massacre; he also put an end to that war. He is the man who many Israelis believe is about to start another war with Iran and possibly even bring an end to the reign of the Ayatollas. That Iran will attack Israel should USA (and possibly Israel) attack Iran is seen as collateral damage.

Every time I see Trump on Israeli news, I ask my wife whether the average American in the street is even slightly interested in what Trump is doing in foreign lands. The partial answer was shown on tv the other night: his US popularity has declined to about 40% (may be lower) which is very low for an incumbent president.

As Professor Michael Covington (who I follow for computing reasons) writes, I think February 20, 2026, may be remembered as the end of the Trump era in American politics — it may have broken Trump's spell in a way that the election of Biden did not. That is the day the Supreme Court overturned Trump's capriciously imposed tariffs. He is trying to reinstate the tariffs by other legal mechanisms, but that's not the important part.

Trump single handedly cost many Israelis a great deal of money when he began a trade war last year: the S&P 500 share benchmark funds dropped in value overnight and have not regained the momentum that they had before. I had no small amount of money linked to the S&P 500 (retirement funds) and although I switched them to Israeli share funds (that had a phenomenal yield last year), there was some loss. Not everyone was adept as I (and there are probably more people adept than me in this field) and so some probably suffered.

Internal links
[1] 2018

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
159	23/02/2009	Diet	Cooking, Food science, Diet, Jeff Duntemann
678	23/02/2014	Carole Bayer Sager - too	Carole Bayer Sager
679	23/02/2014	DCI Banks on television	TV series, DCI Banks, Police procedurals
1378	23/02/2021	My room (waiting for wonderland) - a little musical analysis	Van der Graaf Generator, Music theory