A curious thing happened Tuesday in New York City. A Michelin-starred chef fiddled with a microwave.
It might not be considered so odd as the chef in question was culinary experimenter Wylie Dufresne, who took to the dining room of his restaurant, WD-50, to make an egg dish with a microwave.
"I think microwaves are pretty neat," Dufresne said before his demonstration. The chef uses three standard microwaves in his kitchen and has been testing out this new model for the last three weeks.
"We realized we could poach in the microwave," he said. But it takes time ... 29 minutes to be precise.
Hear how he uses metal in the microwave after the jump.
In the 1970s the handy little ovens we now use to reheat leftovers and frozen dinners experienced a brief golden age, with folks employing them for cooking everything from turkeys to cheesecake. This recipe dates from the glorious reign of microwaves.
Like many of Aunt Evie's recipes, her microwaved sweet-and-sour chicken is easy, convenient and surprisingly flavorful. However, it relies on hard-to-find, annoyingly coarse-textured pickling spice and employs an unnecessary amount of margarine. For the modern incarnation we selected only certain pickling spices and ground them up, resulting in a far more evenly flavored and pleasantly textured dish.
This was an interesting experiment with the tiny oven: Microwaving, which essentially cooks meat from the inside out, didn't really yield chicken that has fully absorbed its sauce (or its savory flavor). Consequently, this recipe yields meat that is tender but bland. With that in mind, stove-top directions are at the end of the recipe. Regardless of which cooking method you use, this is a fun, easy and surprisingly tasty dish. Go, Aunt Evie!
Great news! Here's a kitchen gadget everyone can afford. Your popcorn just got way more awesome.
The Nordic Ware Microwave Corn Popper comes highly recommended by my very practical friend Shannon, who reports that it's really fast, doesn't need oil, and is a snap to clean. Sounds good to me!
This thing is $8.99 from The Kitchen Store, and microwave and dishwasher safe. You just put in the corn, put it in the microwave, and perfect, fluffy popcorn comes out. It's a stroke of Nordic genius.
I only wish it were pretty, so I could pass it off as a holiday gift. Guess I'll just have to get one for myself!
Ever have a potato chip craving at home but didn't have the chips on hand or didn't feel like dealing with the regret afterwards? If you have a microwave and a knife, we have a way to satisfy your craving and your waistline at the same time!
The IWaveCube is so named because of its dimensions: about one cubic foot. That doesn't leave a lot of cooking space. I mean, what are you going to cook in it? The only place where I can see this being useful is in an office break room. I gather that people in an office setting generally only need to heat up small portions of food or cups of coffee, and the IWaveCube could handle that without taking up too much space.
No word on when it'll be available, if it's not already. Do you see this being a useful new kitchen tool?
Getting that crisp and tasty skin on a perfectly cooked baked potato might take a while, but there's one shortcut that can get you good results really quickly.
I feel like I'm revealing some deep, dark secret, but here goes: I microwave my salads.
Now, this isn't because I like my lettuce and carrots and salad dressing really hot, it's because of bacteria. I started doing this a couple of years ago, when we had all those recalls and scares involving pre-made bagged salads and spinach. I make my salad on a plate then zap it for about 20 seconds. Just enough to kill something but not make the salad get hot and shrivel.
Now, I have to stress that I have no idea if 20 seconds in the microwave will even do anything to destroy bacteria, but it makes me feel good anyway.
First, let me apologize to every foodie who reads this blog. I deeply regret making this admission: I do sometimes consume microwavable food.
The new obsession is making me do it.
Black bean and jack cheese burritos from Trader Joe's.
I buy three. Over the course of a week, I eat three. I hide them from my kids. They're perfect for lunch. I work from home, blogging, blogging, blogging, and often waiting until my blood sugar is so low I can barely make it down the stairs into the kitchen. With great effort, I reach into the fridge, pull out a burrito, rip open the wrapper and slap it in the microwave. Two minutes later, I'm shoveling cheesy, beany-goodness into my pate.
I normally turn my nose up at such processed food, but (and I speak here as a native Los Angeleno and lifelong burrito lover), these taste pretty darn good. The cheese melts, the beans taste fresh, the tortilla is firm yet moist....it's the next best thing to running out and buying a fresh burrito. And God knows I'm not taking the time to do that.
Give it a try. Keep a couple of these babies in your fridge for when you need a quick bite. You'll be grateful. And let me know what you think.
It wasn't until I started cooking meals from scratch on a regular basis that I discovered just how much of a fallacy this whole pre-made foods business is. I'm not talking about one of those tasty, pre-roasted chickens or fresh meals you can buy at the supermarket, but rather canned and frozen foods. They are great in a pinch, but they are not a big time saver, and they're certainly not a decent substitute for fresh foods.
So, reading Astin Cubed's post on "Simple Food" today was like reading a rant of my own, without the obsession with snap peas. How can so many of us have forgotten the simplicity of fresh? Or heck, even balancing the two? If you have zero time to make dinner, throw the fish sticks in the oven, boil/microwave/shred and fry some potatoes, or maybe throw some Caesar dressing on some romaine. If you have enough time to go out, wait to be served, eat, wait to pay, and come home, you certainly have enough time to cook up some pasta, fry up some chicken, make a salad, steak, or even stir-fry. Or, even take a day with some free time, make up a lasagna, and eat it during the week, month, or year.
My favorite frozen food: Using those Thanksgiving leftovers to make REAL roasted, carved turkey meals that I can eat all year.
My favorite "fast" food: Leftover fried potatoes with a fried egg on a toasted baguette.
Frozen burritos arrive in the freezer two ways -- either they come in "bulk" in a giant box that takes up two-thirds of your freezer space, or they come individually wrapped. At my grocery store, Tina's Burritos were on that ever-so-deceptive "club card special" for three-for-99-cents. That makes each burrito a very recession-friendly thirty-three cents, but don't think I fell for the advertising double-speak! I only bought one!
The wrapper made a very proud proclamation of "100% CHEDDAR CHEESE." There were no such matching declarations of "100% BEANS" and "100% TORTILLAS." I was worried. I was also slightly worried when the instructions indicated that a person could "cook" the burrito in the microwave oven OR the regular oven. Who would cook a single frozen burrito in the regular oven?! No one, which is why the instructions give you regular oven cooking times for those occasions in which you might be entertaining a dozen dinner guests and will unwrap each individually packaged burrito to heat in the regular oven.
The burrito was not bad for a bean and cheese burrito, but then again, I also doused the entire thing in about ¾ cup of jarred salsa. It didn't feel right to use anything but jarred salsa, by the way. Kind of like putting lipstick on a pork carnitas burrito don't you think?
As Joni Mitchell so eloquently put it, "You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone."
I think she was talking about my stove.
You see, earlier this week, the gas line to my stove developed a leak. The good news? The gas company responded promptly to my frantic phone call, and switched off the gas. The bad news? Until my landlord returns from the country to inspect the site (long story), I'm stuck without a working stove.
My point in telling you all of this? I've become a slave to my Foreman grill. Salads and hummus-on-cold-tortillas only get you so far before you're craving decent, warm food.
In case any of you are ever stuck in a similar predicament, I've decided to list some of the conclusions I have come to during The Week Without A Stove:
You can successfully cook the following vegetarian-friendly foods on a Foreman grill: tofu, polenta, onions/zucchini/eggplant, veggie patties and virtually any type of imitation meat product, toasted sandwiches
It is impossible to cook decent pasta in a microwave
The following food/imitation food products have started to appeal to me solely for their ability to heat quickly without the use of a stove/oven: Easy Mac; toaster pastries; those soups in cardboard containers; individual, microwavable oatmeal packets; 90-second rice
Do you consider "fish sticks and liquor" a legitimate dinner? Appreciate the radioactive glow of freeze-dried gravy? Then check out Trashy Eats. It's the blog Divine from John Waters' Pink Flamingos would have written, had "the filthiest person alive" lived in the Internet era.
The new blog features recipes for things like Bachelor Food (Betty Crocker's Potato Buds mixed frozen veggies and a flavoring packet from ramen noodles) and Frito Pie (canned chili, Fritos, cheese, onion), and reviews of stuff like Banquet Homestyle Bakes. Stuff that costs about $1 a serving and can be nuked in less time than it takes to pop open a can of Mountain Dew. Stuff that makes Slow Foods members cry.
Got your own trashy favorites? The webmaster is looking for contributions.
Now, I'm not sure if this means this is the day to buy a microwave oven or cook something in a microwave oven. I'll assume the former (though maybe this is a good day to finally replace the one you've been using for 15 years).
You know how we, in all our food snobby ways, always snicker a little when we hear about those poor, ignorant people who think using the microwave oven is "cooking?"
Well, using the microwave might not actually be so bad.
According to "green" experts and The Green Book authors Thomas Kostigen and Elizabeth Rogers, microwaves are more than 4x more energy efficient than traditional ovens! If everyone in North America cooked exclusively with a microwave for a year, we could use the saved energy to light up the entire continent of Africa for a year (not that Africa needs lighting, but you know what I mean). Keeping your microwave clean helps maximize its energy.
Seattle is thinking about banning microwave popcorn. The Justice Center has had to be evacuated eight times in the past three years because of burnt popcorn in the microwave making the smoke alarms go off. That means over 400 employees have to be evacuated each time. It is also happening in the city's Municipal Tower.
This isn't a joke: read the memo. If the problem continues, they're going to ban it in downtown buildings.
We can change the way we make eggs -- scrambled, poached, fried -- but what about changing the eggs themselves? Mix up your scrambling routine with quail eggs.
Great news! Here's a kitchen gadget everyone can afford. Your popcorn just got way more awesome.
First, let me apologize to every foodie who reads this blog. I deeply regret making this admission: I do sometimes consume microwavable food.
Do you consider "fish sticks and liquor" a legitimate dinner? Appreciate the radioactive glow of freeze-dried gravy? Then check out 
Now, I'm not sure if this means this is the day to buy a microwave oven or cook something in a microwave oven. I'll assume the former (though maybe this is a good day to finally replace the one you've been using for 15 years).
The hell?
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