One singer, Eliza Rickman, is someone I’ve been a fan of since I first heard her busking on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, accompanying herself on toy piano released a couple new singles this year, advance previews of a covers album that she’s hoping will finally be out this year. I suspect though, that the faster cycling of on and off power in heating with 66% power for 24 minutes would not give the heat the same chance to spread through the frozen food.Ģ020 was a pretty rough year for musicians, especially those at the lower end of the pyramid who depend on live performance for their livelihoods. The Trader Joe’s approach above is effectively a manual version of low-power cooking in the microwave. From this, I learned among other things that when you set the microwave to, say, 50% power, it’s not actually reducing the power of the microwaves but turning the microwave on and off during the cooking process. In researching this, I discovered that Randall Monroe of XKCD has (of course) already looked at a similar question about cooking food in the microwave. This is apparently a time-honored practice in cooking food that I’ve learned about from watching Chopped where the contestants would let recently-cooked meat rest a few minutes before slicing it to enable the heat to spread internally.

But by giving the lasagna time to rest before heating it some more. This is great advice if you’re cooking fettuccine Alfredo, but lasagna is remarkably resistant to being stirred¹. A lot of microwave food has the instructions to, halfway through the cooking process, stir the food before finishing it off. Rather than just popping the lasagna in the microwave and taking it out fifteen minutes later, it has multiple steps of heating the food, then waiting, then heating some more.

Xkcd tiny piano