Waffling

This morning, our CuisineArt waffle iron died. Actually, it didn't so much die as transform itself into a zombie, going from a normal waffle iron to one that lightly toasted one side of a waffle and deeply charred the other side. Me being an American husband, I thought that perhaps I could fix it. I couldn't. I heard arcing inside it, and the inside of the top cover was discolored, as though there'd been high heat there (granted, nothing odd about that with a waffle iron). But I had no idea what was wrong. Since the device was about six years old, we pitched it. I bought a new one today, different brand, same style.

Herewith, some observations.

• If a device has a red and a green light, one would expect that the red means 'not ready' and the green means 'ready'. With the CA iron, that was the case -- red while heating, green when usable, cycling between the two. With this new one (Krups), red means 'not ready', and both red and green means 'ready', with the green cycling on and off. This strikes me as odd.
• The reason I chose this brand was that the CA one on display seemed shoddy, with a loose handle and a weak clip. By contrast, the Krups had a broad, easily grasped handle. This is good. But -- it also has a clip to hold the halves together when the device is not in use. This clip is exactly in the right spot to engage the handles when you put the top down -- but their documentation clearly says not to use the clip while the device is in use, lest the waffles not expand. This strikes me as poor design. Think they'll get a tiger team together and fix it if I point it out to them?
• Some models of waffle iron are huge -- a massive flat section that you manually rotate to cook the waffle. I didn't get it, and I can't imagine why in the world would you want to have to do that. It looks like the kind of thing that the cook in a short-order restaurant would use.
  

Thats it for now. But tomorrow, we try it out.