Food that goes 'PING'

LadyBelle said:
Only reheating and heating up ready meals here at Lady B Towers. Have read a lot about cakes in a mug which are normally microwaved but never quite have plucked up the courage to give them a try.
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Cakes tend to come out rather rubbery. But I do sometimes make a 'steamed' pudding in the microwave.
 
Another vote for mostly just reheating frozen foods, frozen dinners, leftovers, and softening/melting things like butter, rock hard brown sugar, or helping honey or molasses to flow more easily. And of course there's nuked potatoes (as opposed to genuinely baked), and popcorn. I also use it to soften veggies for my birds on occasion. My Molluccan likes "cooked" carrots, and warm sweet potatoes.

I bought a micriwave searing plate many years ago that was supposed to heat up enough to brown meats, but not overheat of throw sparks that might damage the unit. It was some strange metal looking disc encased in a thick plastic larger disc.

I tried it a few times, but the meat (steaks and burgers) just sort of cooked to a greyish beige on the outside while being overcooked on the edges, and mostly raw in the center.

I think it became a frisbee for a while after that.
 
Btw, don't ever try to cook raw eggs in a microwave, in or out of the shell unless they're scrambled.

This just reminded me of a time when I had a job after school in a Burger King. We used to use these black grease pencils to mark what kind of burgers were in the wrappers as we made them.
I accidentally threw the grease pencil into the nuker with some other food to reheat, and then the show started.
The grease in the pencil heated up and turned it into a rocket inside the microwave, spewing out melted black grease/ink as it bounced around inside.
I spent the rest of my shift trying to clean out that microwave, but it was a lost cause. The grease was in every corner, hole, and edge and the smell could not be removed. I basically destroyed a very expensive professional microwave to the dismay of my boss. I can't imagine how he explained that one to his superiors.
 
I use mine every day as a hidey hole for keeping food away from the mutt and the cats. Otherwise it's used mainly for thawing and reheating. Sponge cakes cook nicely, although they do need some form of colouring or coating, as do sponge puddings. I also have an egg poacher for use in the microwave.
 
I don't have one! I can't think of anything I would need one for that would justify the loss of worktop space. Warming things up can be done in the oven, and things defrost perfectly well in the fridge if I remember to take them out of the freezer in plenty of time. I guess I'm a bit of a Luddite! However, in a commercial kitchen they make perfect sense.

I have fond memories (with the passage of time) of my dear belated mother in law regularly adding a few too many zero's to the cooking time of her ready meals. I'm not sure she ever quite understood the principles of the device. We had to politely confiscate the thing in the end, before she came to grief!
 
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sidevalve said:
But We do use ours for the initial cooking of baked potatoes with just the last ten mins or so in the oven - otherwise a quick snack can seemingly take forever !!!
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I use ours for that - 2 minutes per potato (or less depending upon size) then about 20 - 30 minutes in the halogen at 200 degC (or 70 -80 minutes in the gas oven at the same temperature).

If we didn't have a microwave already (prior to buying the halogen) I may not bother buying one now.
 
epicuric said:
I don't have one! I can't think of anything I would need one for that would justify the loss of worktop space.
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Mine is built in above the work surface so it doesn't take up counter space. This is just as well as I have very small galley kitchen. I use mine more recently as I've been making an effort to do so. I soften butter for recipes, I make Bechamel sauce, cook potatoes for potato salad (the flavour is much intensified IMHO). I heat up apricot jam to glaze pastries (how would you do that otherwise?) I cook fresh spinach, frozen peas and beans. I defrost food sometimes too. But I use it for cooking more often. I hasten bread dough rising (using the 10 second method). I use it to extract maximum juice from lemons and limes - pierce the fruit and heat for 10 seconds.

Its also great for making porridge in a matter of minutes.
 
morning glory said:
Mine is built in above the work surface so it doesn't take up counter space. This is just as well as I have very small galley kitchen. I use mine more recently as I've been making an effort to do so. I soften butter for recipes, I make Bechamel sauce, cook potatoes for potato salad (the flavour is much intensified IMHO). I heat up apricot jam to glaze pastries (how would you do that otherwise?) I cook fresh spinach, frozen peas and beans. I defrost food sometimes too. But I use it for cooking more often. I hasten bread dough rising (using the 10 second method). I use it to extract maximum juice from lemons and limes - pierce the fruit and heat for 10 seconds.

Its also great for making porridge in a matter of minutes.
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I've never thought of putting bread dough in a microwave - what setting do you use? I sometimes use my oven to hasten the second (or third) rising and then just up the oven temperature to cook the bread. In hindsight I wish I'd got the oven with a proving drawer but they didn't have one in stock at the shop and I needed a working oven rather quickly (I went to the shop at lunch time; it was delivered and fitted that afternoon!) - my old oven went bang while my bread was cooking, and whilst finishing it off in a rotisserie did work, it wasn't ideal. On the plus side, my oven has a defrost setting, which takes longer but is a bit more accurate than using the microwave - no cooked edges for a start. I forgot to get the dog's chicken out of the freezer this morning and trying to defrost chicken legs in a microwave with a large, hungry dog bouncing around in the kitchen is no mean feat. I used to keep ferrets at one time, and their food was always defrosted in the microwave. The only problem with that was that, every time the microwave pinged, the ferrets thought they were getting fed,

I have several books of recipes specifically for microwave cooking - I think I will have to re-investigate the recipes in them.

P.S. I had porridge this morning - made from my organic muesli. 5 minutes in a pan of milk and hey presto! The only problem was that I then had to order an extra pint of milk from the milkman for the weekend's yoghurt making session. The only unhomogenised milk that Tesco do is "currently not available".....:mad::cry:
 
Elawin said:
P.S. I had porridge this morning - made from my organic muesli. 5 minutes in a pan of milk and hey presto! The only problem was that I then had to order an extra pint of milk from the milkman for the weekend's yoghurt making session. The only unhomogenised milk that Tesco do is "currently not available"
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Firstly, you are lucky you still have a milkman! Secondly, if you make the porridge in the microwave there is no pan to wash up!
 
The only thing that I've cooked in a microwave that's not a reheat is spaghetti squash. In fact, this is my preferred way to cook spaghetti squash. These are not my instructions, but they're close to what I do. But, instead of placing a sheet of carcinogenic plastic on my squash, I simply put it face-down in a ceramic pan with about an inch of water in the bottom.

How-To-Cook-Spaghetti-Squash_15882.jpg
 
The things that I never use the microwave for is anything that requires stirring, so that's all sauces, porridge and scrambled egg. It's just too annoying to have to keep stopping and opening the door.
 
morning glory said:
Firstly, you are lucky you still have a milkman!
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I live next to 2 medium-sized industrial estates and opposite an enormous industrial estate, a retail park and rather large Tesco. The milkmen round here are kept very busy with regular deliveries. My 3 or 4 pints a week pales into insignificance. However, when Muller decided to do away with several of the milk rounds, ours was kept on - obviously very profitable for them. In spite of the fact that their milk is expensive, they do have their advantages - some of their offers are cheaper than Tesco; and a couple of times the milkman has knocked to see if I'm OK because things were not quite as they should have been at 4 a.m.
 
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