So I was thinking this morning about a recipe I’m going to be working on tonight and I was reminded that one of the steps calls for microwaving something. Well, that’s a problem. See, we don’t own a microwave. We haven’t owned one since, um, I lived in Joliet, I think. The main reason is that I’ve never really had much need of one. I used it primarily to melt butter (which takes only a hair longer on the stove) and to boil water (which takes about as long as the electric kettle we have). I’m vastly amused because our lack of this appliance seems to boggle many of our friends.
A secondary reason is that, for me personally, having a microwave encourages lazy cooking. Call it a remnant from my chemist father (“I work with chemicals all day long, I don’t want to eat them, too!”) – I tend to avoid processed food whenever possible, which means steering clear of frozen dinners, meals in can or boxes, and that sort of thing. Sure, it took me an hour and a half to make chicken and dumplings last night when I could have just picked up a package of Swanson Frozen Chicken and Dumplings and microwaved it in five minutes or less. The big difference to me is that first, there is a sense of pride of having Made Something, and second, my dinner was actually (for me) edible.
Please don’t take this as a condemnation of how others eat and cook, though – this is what works for me. I know that I’m lucky to have the time and knowledge to cook like this. One of the big influences on my tastes is the couple of years my parents spent living in France, where their refrigerator was the size of a tall dorm fridge and it was the norm to go grocery shopping every day for the freshest meat and produce. I certainly don’t have the inclination to shop every day, but I do only tend to shop for three or four days at a time.
Anyway, enough of that little digression. Oh, the recipe that I’m working on tonight? Dulce de Leche Cake (from Cook’s Country magazine). Basically, you make a sturdier-than-usual sponge cake (using whole eggs instead of just whites), poke holes into it and pour a Dulce de Leche mixture over it and let it soak for 3-24 hours, then frost with a whipped cream frosting. The recipe calls for the Dulce de Leche mixture (a combination of sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk, heavy cream, and vanilla) to be microwaved for several minutes to cook it. Fortunately, they offer an alternative where you pour the mixture into a pie plate, put it in a roasting pan and pour boiling water around it, and cook it in the oven for 40 minutes (and apparently 80 minutes will reduce it to the thick, gooey Dulce de Leche sauce that goes so well over ice cream – we’ll need to try that too!).
Oh, you want to try some of the cake? You’ll need to come to Game Night, then 🙂
I resisted the microwave for a very long time, but finally realized that it is a useful tool in any kind of cooking. It isn’t just for heating up frozen dinners.
I use mine for innumerable intermediate and preparatory steps, from thawing frozen ingredients to producing lump-free sauces.
Sure, you can do without. I did. But calling it “lazy” is like calling any other kitchen tool “lazy”. My great grandmothers and grandmothers used wood stoves. Now that’s doing things the hard way, believe me. I doubt they called the gas range “lazy” when they were introduced to it. ;p
Ah, you misconstrued what I wrote. I didn’t call it a lazy tool. I said that it encourages what I define to be lazy cooking on my part. I certainly see the utility of it, and if I had one I would certainly use it (as I have when we have lived with roommates who had one).
Well, the gist of my intent here is to suggest that you consider getting a small microwave. Since you obviously take cooking seriously, I think you will find it just as useful as a mixer, or a pressure cooker, or any of a myriad other tools you may have. Doesn’t sound like there’s much risk that you’d be tempted into “lazy cooking” by just having one, and a small sized one costs a lot less than a Kitchen-Aid mixer. ;p
I agree (see recent rants in my own journal) that Americans are falling into a pit of living off processed and fast food to the point where they have no idea about nutrition or even just what food is made of or where it comes from. It comes out of a box, doesn’t it? Made in factories? Probably from leftover petroleum byproducts, no? Watching what other people have in their carts at the supermarket is the ultimate in depressing.
I was going to post a comment similar to Altivo’s, but not exactly the same. I did catch the distinction between “lazy tool” and “encourages lazy behavior [in Duncan].”
We use ours for odd things, including the melting of butter and making rice in our rice steamer thingie. Particularly for the odd wild rice blends I make, it’s much easier to get the rice fulling cooked without burning from of it in the microwave steamer than on the stove.
But mostly we use it to defrost things, or rather, to finish defrosting something–that we need to get cooking by a particular time because we have 15 people coming over, say.
We use the crockpot and the pressure cooker more often than the microwave.
We only replaced the old microwave that I’d inherited from an in-law because we decided when it started interfering with the TV, that was a good indication that it had probably been irradiating us for a while. Of course it was at least 25 years old, so maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised.
Heh, we get the same kind of reaction when we tell people we don’t have cable. “But… but what do you do all night?” they ask in amazement. 😉
We have a microwave: not ancient, but old enough to be a bit out-dated. We use it primarilly for the following things: melting butter, softening butter, softening ice cream, making microwave popcorn (I know it’s terrible for me, but I love it), making TVP tacos (zapping them with the “meat” mixture in them for ~1 min softens the shells just enough so that they’re still crunchy, but they don’t disintegrate when you fill them), and reheating leftovers. We never do TV dinners for dinner, and I haven’t taken one in my lunch for over a month.
I see it as a tool of convenience. I’m with you, I much prefer cooking stuff from scratch because I love the satisfaction I get from it. I feel kinda bad for someone when I see them at the checkout line, and all they have are microwaveable meals: no fresh stuff at all, besides milk or bread. Think of what they’re missing!
Yeah, reheating leftovers is one time that I do kind of wish we had a microwave. Then again, it speaks poorly of our portion control (or well of my dinner planning, but mostly the former) that we rarely have much in the way of leftovers. If we do, they usually go to work with me or Dan, though.
I’ve read a good bit about TVP in the past – I’m curious about experimenting with it sometime 🙂
shhhhh!
😉
TVP is a blast from my past. Growing up with vegetarian neighbors introduced me to a lot of meat substitutes and a long-running (friendly) argument as to whether or not meat substitutes worked against the spirit of converting to vegetarianism.
Enjoy the TVP. Not too long ago, you could only find it here by visiting health food stores or buying a stash from the Seventh Day Adventists.
I love your icon. 😀
I recently had some TVP taco dip. It was very tasty and I’m not sure I ever would have known it was TVP if I hadn’t been told. I am sure that many people at the party where it was served never had a clue.
I love the microwave, it melts the cheese on my home made sandwiches. And it makes uneddible peeps more entertaining.
This post is just mean…that sounds delicious…and I’m stuck at work with a drawer full of granola treats…
Well, you’ll have to come by for dinner sometime!
microwave
I use the microwave primarily for 2 things – nuking frozen veggies & to hold whatever cake of the week we have (unless it’s got to be refigerated)….
but my question is what’s your chicken & dumplings recipe? My mom made a great one, but alas, she never wrote anything down. Point me in the right direction, son;)
mom;)
Re: microwave
Well, it’s funny you should ask. I seem to have just the write-up right here!
Note that that is the “Weekend Version”. The other night, I made the “Weeknight Version”, which consisted of simmering two large boneless, skinless chicken breasts in 6 cups of Swanson’s Natural Goodness (low-sodium) Chicken Broth (their organic broth is good too) for 20 minutes, then cooling and shredding them, then continuing with the recipe from Step 4. I used two recipes of the Bisquick biscuits for dumplings (4 1/2 cups of Bisquick plus 1 2/3 cups of milk) ’cause we loves us some dumplings 🙂 Heh – I note that I call for microwaving veggies in that recipe, but you can steam ’em on the stovetop just as well.
Re: microwave
thanks! sounds good to me.
Would you like a “WHAT”? Just thinking four months down the road………………….
Ok, so I am way behind reading, but what do you use to heat up leaftovers? That’s the main thing I use mine for. Do people actually *cook* in a microwave? Yuck. I melt butter, reheat leftovers (and my microwave has a sensor setting for this so I just say “reheat dinner plate” and it does!) and cook bacon. I always burn it if I cook it in a pan, so the microwave is tastier… oh, and the microwave has a sensor setting for that too… I’m not sure we are capable of cooking so that we don’t have leftovers. Heck, we can cook for 7 people and still have leftover. The microwave is great for reheating but I totally agree, for cooking, not so much.