Howdy, internet! Try not to freak out. I know. I’m writing again, so soon? How? Well, I am doing habit forming stuff, and ta-da, making use of the blog I have had for years is now one of them. You’re welcome.

Anyway, I wanted to talk about my latest obsession a bit. My microwave.

For the longest time, I did not enjoy food cooked in the microwave, because of a few reasons.

First, there was the whole notion that the microwave is less healthy somehow than cooking in a regular oven. I don’t know where this idea started, but it is silly. It is just another way to cook food, it adds nothing, detracts nothing. It’s just faster. But because we don’t understand science, we assume it’s magic, and therefore there has to be a horrible trade-off in the form of some radiation boogeyman or something.

If anything, the microwave is HEALTHIER than conventional ovens, because vitamins are exposed to heat far less as long. In fact, they even used to advertise the microwave as the healthy alternative, way back in the 80s. How the times have changed!

Second thing, meals made in the microwave just didn’t turn out very good. Personal opinion, but undeniably true. Which also turned out to be user error, it seems. Yup, this one was on me, folks.

Ya see, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the instructions beyond how many minutes to cook things. Turns out, paying attention makes things way way better. Go figure.

For instance, my microwave is a 1000 watt model. Most things I put in it, the instructions were written for a 1100 watt model. Yours could be a 700 watt model, or a 1500 watt model. Its very rare that my microwave’s wattage was the wattage the instructions applied to. So I was always cooking food with the wrong power, for the wrong duration. Only by 100 watts, but boy howdy, when I solved it did it actually have quite the impact on the finished product. Three minutes should have been three minutes and another 18 seconds, and that 18 seconds might not seem like a lot, but when you are cooking with the amount of power microwaves put out, it really does. Food in a conventional oven has a lot wider margin for error, and you can get away with a minute or two off, but seconds matter in a microwave.

And just how did I accomplish that discovery? Well, I found a calculator online that finds the proper cooking times for your microwaves wattage. You could do the math yourself, by taking the package instructions intended wattage multiplied by the time in seconds, and then divide by your microwave’s wattage, but the online calculator simplifies it. You just enter the wattage and time from the box, and your microwave’s wattage, and it tells you the time. I found https://microwave-calculator.com/ and https://www.omnicalculator.com/everyday-life/microwave-wattage#how-do-i-convert-microwave-cooking-times very handy. The first one can even be saved to my phone’s home screen and is an easy go-to for having the right times for preparing my meals. The second one does a bit better job explaining the math, but also lets you find times shorter than a minute, which is the one drawback I’d say for that first one. But either one, very helpful.

Third thing, I got my microwave second hand. It was given to me by my mom. She got a new one, her old one wasn’t even that old, it just did not fit as well as she liked under the cabinet. Mine was getting some years on it, so I saw it as a bargain and a chance to upgrade. Free microwave that was practically new! Heck yeah! But they had thrown out the manual, of course. So this thing had settings I didn’t even know about. It has express cooking number buttons, that just start the microwave for however many minutes and a button that adds thirty seconds. Didn’t know I had an option to fine tune the time to the second, or lower the power until I found the manual online by searching for the model number. And that kind of knowledge unlocks a world of possibilities. Slower cooking times at lower power give you greater control over your cooking, and can be the key to unlocking even better results than you ever imagined.

Figured out fairly early the popcorn button on my microwave is very dependable too, so I can ignore the “Do Not Use The Popcorn Setting On Your Microwave” warning that comes with all microwave popcorn boxes. Cause, yeah. That’s a lie! You can use that setting! Sometimes it works perfectly! The popcorn company is not the boss of you! That warning came when the technology was still quite primitive and humidity sensors and junk that let your microwave know if it has reached optimal popping power weren’t quite as good as our modern technology, and on a lot of microwaves, you can just trust it now. So, try that setting, sometime. It may work. Mine delivers fully popped bags with hardly a kernel unpopped and nothing burnt, every time. It’s fantastic! Haven’t tried the “Potato” button yet. I’m hoping it bakes a potato, and doesn’t turn the microwave into a potato. I would be sad.

And lastly, that “Let rest for 1 to 2 minutes” step. Don’t ignore that step! Not just to keep from burning your mouth, that is actually time in which the food is still cooking, even though the microwave is no longer adding power. Excited water molecules are still hard at work making your food amazing, and we’ve just been interrupting them and cooling them off too quickly for them to properly finish the job. Like a bunch of impatient jerks. I had always assumed it was some legal obligation to keep from getting sued by litigious consumers, but no, that’s actually just further cooking that’ll happen after the microwaving part is done.

So, yeah. Turns out, microwaving food, you can get better results by being smarter, and just reading and doing a little tiny search on the internet. Obviously, still temper expectations to the sort of results you should expect from a plastic tray from a microwave. It won’t be as pretty as lightly browned baked goods, especially if that food was assembled in the tray in a factory. Presentation takes a back seat to efficiency. But basically, you flash boil food from the inside using the water in the food, and you get faster, fully cooked and equally as delicious food as you would get from a conventional oven, thanks to the power of radio waves. You just have to know how your microwave works to get the best results.

And that means all those disappointing TV dinners were the result, likely, of user error. Good job, me.

Can’t wait to try baking brownies in this thing. Because that’s apparently a thing you can do, too!