Microwave Recipes
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Most of us use our microwave ovens for simple tasks. They are great for heating up left over take out food or from a meal you made in your conventional oven. The microwave is also a great tool to use with dishes prepared for the microwave such as popcorn or frozen dinners. But to limit the use of your microwave to just heating things up leaves behind one of the best ways to take full advantage of your microwave oven and that is by using to cook an entire meal. To do so, all you really need is a good understanding of the settings on your microwave, some good recipes and a spirit of experimentation and adventure to give it a try.
The advantage of cooking full meals using your microwave is that it saves both time and energy doing it this way. If you can cook a main dish in fifteen minutes what might have taken an hour and a half in a conventional oven, that not only makes meal preparation so much easier for you, it cuts down on the power needed to work your gas or electric oven and it reduces the amount of heat that is pumped into your home when you use a full sized oven. There is no reason you cannot prepare main dishes or delicious side dishes in your microwave oven that are just as good as the conventional style of cooking. You just have to find recipes that adapt the cooking process to the unique aspects of cooking with microwaves.
It is best to seek out recipes that are distinctly designed for microwave cooking rather than attempt to make the same dish the same way as you did with your conventional oven and just adjust the times. Recipes that were created for the microwave, even of traditional dishes like meat loaf or roast beef, take into account the unique issues that come with microwave cooking. One such issue is how microwave cooking almost always results in "hot spots" in your dish meaning some part of the dish will come out hot and in the same bowl, some parts of the food will be room temperature. Microwave turntables accommodate this problem well. But if you do not automate the turning of the food, your recipe will call for more repeated stirrings of your dishes to overcome this minor problem.
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It isn’t difficult to find recipes for making just about any dish you can think of in your microwave. Your microwave may have come with a small recipe book. But there are many web sites and microwave cookbooks to consult. Many of these recipes will call for you to know how to adjust the time and the temperature of your microwave. So before you take on anything very advanced, get to know your microwave well. By starting out with simple recipes and slowly experimenting and learning new skills in microwave cooking, before long you may be cooking all your meals in that handy little microwave oven in the corner of your kitchen.
