Confession time.  One of the most neglected appliances in our house is the microwave.  More times than I care to admit it might look like this when you open the door.  (Warning: If you have an aversion to nasty things, don’t look.)

Now, I must tell you that my microwave is on its 29^th year of service to us and it does show some signs of wear and tear, but that is no excuse for the nasty.  We can ashamedly chalk that up to just plain neglect.   I can’t take all the credit for this plethora of whatever is in there, but I do take the blame for putting off cleaning it especially seeing how easy it is to do.

All that you need to do is put 1 cup of vinegar and 1 cup hot water into a microwave proof measuring cup or bowl.  I add a wooden dowel stick to the mix because it is believed that this adds a little safety to heating water in the microwave and is suppose to help prevent superheating.  I set the microwave for 5-7 minutes and walk away.  I usually don’t come back for about 15 minutes, allowing the steam to break down the crud. Then I carefully remove the hot vinegar mix (using a pot holder so as not to get burned by either the hot container or accidentally splashing the contents.)  Then I just take a wet rag and begin removing the disgusting stuff.  Most of it comes off without any scrubbing.  The edges at the door were especially nasty this time so I made a paste from the hot vinegar mix and a little baking soda and scrubbed with an old tooth brush.  After about 10 minutes of wiping and scrubbing, check out how nice and clean it is:

(Please note that the dark/red marks you still see are the signs of age of which I was speaking.)

This is what the door edge looked like before the baking soda and vinegar toothbrush scrub.

It did a really good job getting that built up gunk off.

Now if I can only keep it looking so good for more than a week, we’ll be in good shape.