Despite my years of dabbling in the kitchen and conquering some rather ambitious recipes cooked with good old-fashion convection heat, I’ve pretty much remained a fearing stranger to the microwave. My trepidation begins with any microwavable food product that states in its instructions, “cooking times are approximate,” or “rearrange food when heating more than two items at a time.” Approximate to what? And rearrange how?

Part of the problem is that I’d been toiling with an antiquated model crafted in the early 1980s – a big clunky box with faux wood finishing and no option to adjust the power levels. Frozen dinners that required 50-percent power, for example, often wheezed or crackled before exploding in a ferocious sneeze. The cleanup after heating split pea soup was particularly atrocious. And I’m convinced that after all those years of spattered projectile, the unreachable chunks eventually choked the oven’s magnetron circuits, which left me with way too many intact kernels at the bottom of those Newman’s Own popcorn bags.

As microwave technology continuously improved, and friends started claiming to have cooked things like chicken Kiev and peaches flambé in their own radio-wave ovens, I finally succumbed to a new device – a slick, stainless steel, 2,450-megahertz beauty with 10 power levels. Heating a slice of cold pizza the day I plugged her in was like sending off my first email.

“You won’t believe how fast and amazing this thing is,” I boasted to several friends who wondered if I’d been cooking my meals over an open flame on the beach all along. “There’s even a revolving glass tray inside!”

Better yet, the manual came with a cooking chart and recipe booklet. My eyes eagerly gravitated to dishes such as salmon steaks, pork loin, fresh artichokes and other savories that went far beyond tomato soup. Life was about to get a whole lot easier, I thought.

My first experiment seemed geared for neophytes: “American scrambled eggs.” The instructions called for a 15-second jolt to melt the butter – then an additional three to four minutes for cooking the beaten eggs in an uncovered glass casserole dish. At that point I was supposed to hit the pause button and stir.

It took only two minutes and several seconds before the mixture solidified and rose in the middle like some sixth-grade science project on volcanoes. What should have been scrambled eggs turned into a rubbery omelet with a puffy middle and rugged edges.

Pasta, I assumed, would be foolproof, requiring the simple step of boiling water for nine minutes on HIGH before tossing in the dry noodles. The instructions continue with, “Add 8 ounces of pasta and stir through the water. Cover and cook 6 to 9 minutes on SIMMER.”

But my new microwave doesn’t show a “simmer” setting, which meant the time was ripe to playfully ding through all those nifty power levels. I chose 20 percent, which kept the water at a low, safe boil.

I’m still grappling over what went awry. Was this prank pasta? Or did the water absorb too much microwave energy, which basically turned it into gluten soup? So much for the claim that food cooks two to four times faster in microwaves. The pasta was slimy and gummy, and I lost another seven minutes of my life boiling a new batch on the stovetop.

Will I be trying my hands at the recipes for Cheese and Mushroom Canapés or Grasshopper Pie? Probably not, or at least until someone sticks in my face a piece of crispy breaded chicken they cooked in their microwave and explains exactly how it was done.