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!
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