Special Uses for the Oven
Use your microwave appliance for many cooking tasks normally done on top of the range and also for some of those jobs done in your regular oven. Besides general recipe preparation, popular uses for the microwave oven include the quick reheating of leftovers, take-out foods, and convenience foods, plus the speedy thawing of frozen foods.
Leftovers: In these days of stretching the dollar, it’s important to use up every bit of food. The microwave oven makes turning leftovers into a meal a snap. The food is palatable and easy to serve. As a general guideline for reheating cooked food, allow about 1 1/2 minutes for each cup or 8 ounces of cooked food. When warming several different foods on one plate, make sure that the serving portions are similar for even heating. It’s a good idea to under heat the food and check the temperature before continuing to cook.
Convenience foods: Turn the supper you purchased at the deli on the way home into a warm-as-toast meal with your microwave oven. There are many other convenience foods you can heat in your oven, too. However, check the oven manufacturer’s directions for products and timings for these foods as well as whether you can cook food in its foil pan.
Defrosting foods: If you’ve ever been caught having to prepare dinner but have forgotten to take some food out of the freezer to thaw, you’ll certainly appreciate a microwave oven. The frozen food is thawed, cooked or heated, and ready for your hungry family in practically no time at all.
Some models have a defrost setting as a built in feature. If your appliance has and automatic defrost, consult the manufacturer’s directions for usage instructions and for timings.
However, defrosting can be done in any microwave appliance without an automatic defrost Simply alternate cooking and standing times. Time allows the food temperature to equalize so that the outside of the food doesn’t begin to cook while the inside of the food is still defrosting.
As rule of thumb, for every 1 cup 8 ounces of frozen, cooked food, micro-cook 1 minute and let the food stand in the appliance without the power turned on for 1 minute. Repeat the cycles until just a few ice crystals remain in the food. For 2 cups or 16 ounces, the cycles would be 2 minutes on, 2 minutes off. Once the food is thawed, micro-heat allowing about 1 ½ minutes per cup of food. Follow recipe directions for preparing uncooked frozen food.
Other uses: Not only do you use your oven to prepare entire recipes, you also will use it to do those small tasks, such as melting butter or chocolate for cooking. Or, you can get crisp bacon for a bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwich by cooking slices between layers of paper toweling in a flat dish. Merely allow 1 to 1 ½ minutes for one slice; 2 ½ to 3 minutes for six bacon slices Or for a quick snack that even the kids can fix, wrap a frankfurter and frozen bun together in a paper napkin and micro-cook in less than a minute.
As you use your microwave appliance, you will undoubtedly find many other uses that will help you with everyday food preparation chores. You may discover some non-food uses for the oven.
December 18 2007 05:41 am | Micro-Cooking and Microwave Appliance
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
