Cooking in the microwave – 7 meal ideas to try

June 18th, 2014

Appliance Talk Microwaves

If you only use your microwave for defrosting and reheating, you may be surprised by just how well it can cook when you give it try.

Here’s a short list of some of our favourite microwave meal ideas, complete with tips and tricks!

Microwave baking

Oven on the fritz?  In the mood for a sweet treat but not quite ready to eat an entire cake by yourself?

Sticky Date Pudding In a Mug by Melissa Darr of Best Home Chef

Don’t worry.  Pretty much anything that you can bake, you can also microwave.

Just substitute the large metal baking dish for a more modest-sized ceramic mug, and reduce the ingredient quantities, and you can enjoy chocolate cake, muffins, brownies and more, all conveniently sized for one!

Microwave bacon

(not to be confused with microwave baking, above)

Many people have tried to cook their bacon without frying the stuff, using everything from sandwich presses to homemade alarm clocks, and most have been disappointed.

Experiments with heating bacon in the microwave often have mixed success rates, often resulting in soggy, fatty strips of meat, or the deployment of copious paper towels in a vain attempt to absorb the grease.

image source: lifehacker

But one suggestion we found online is to place your bacon on top of an overturned bowl – this allows the fat to drip down the sides, resulting in crispy and (relatively) healthy bacon!  Might want to keep a plate underneath the bowl to catch those drips, though.

Microwave eggs

Most classic egg recipes have been passed down through generations of home cooks, so it’s understandable why many of us aren’t familiar with preparing them using the relatively modern microwave.  But rest assured – it is possible!

image source: the kitchn

From poaching an egg in a bowl of water, to cooking a bowlful of eggs that’ve been scrambled with a fork, the microwave can do the job.  However, we wouldn’t recommend boiling an egg in a microwave, as the microwave energy will heat up the egg’s liquid interior until it explodes messily.

It is possible to hard-boil an egg in a microwave by wrapping the egg in foil and making sure it is COMPLETELY submerged in water (as described at Spatula, Spoon & Saturday), but this is also dangerous as it involves putting metal in the microwave – while the water should prevent accidents, you can’t be too careful.  We do NOT recommend trying this one at home!

Microwave rice and quinoa

In my house, cooking rice is one of the primary uses for the microwave.  And I DON’T mean the packets of pre-cooked rice that warm up in 2 minutes (though they do make the occasional appearance when time and energy is is short supply).

Image Source: Steamy Kitchen

Place the grains of your rice or quinoa in an appropriate container (plastic, glass or ceramic should all work fine in the microwave), add water, cover with a lid with a vent for excess steam, and cook for as long as it takes.

You may need to experiment a bit to get the right water ratio and get the best cooking times for different grains – I’ve found that brown rice tends to take longer to cook and uses more water than preparing white rice, for example.

Microwave chips

Take a root vegetable of your choice (potato, parsnip, sweet potato, etc).  Slice thinly.  Maybe add a touch of oil.  Microwave.

image source: Try It You Might Like It

Bam – you’ve got yourself some chips!

Make sure the veggies are sliced thinly, so they end up nice and crispy rather than mushy and soggy like an overcooked microwave potato.

image source: Keep it up David!

And you’re not restricted to just root vegetables, either – you can also use thinly-sliced fruits such as apples or pears, or more unusual ingredients.  For a nutritious treat, try microwaving up a batch of crunchy kale chips!

Toasting nuts in the microwave

Place a layer of nuts on a microwave-safe plate.  Nuke’em (don’t worry, there’s no dangerous radiation in a microwave).  You’ve got yourself some toasted nuts!

image source: My Baking Addiction

Sure, they won’t have the same browned, scorched look from toasting them on the stove, but they should have a similar taste, texture and consistency.

And you raren’t restricted to just toasting nuts in your microwave – you can also use your microwave to toast coconut in a pinch.

Steamed/boiled vegetables in the microwave

Steaming or boiling veggies in a microwave might actually be more nutritious than cooking them in the traditional way, as the cooking time is shorter, which means there’s less time for nutrients to “leach” out of the veggies and into the water.

image source: Easy Weeknight Dinners

To steam or boil veggies in the microwave, simply chop your veggies into bite-size chunks, place them in a microwave-safe container, cover (leaving a small hole for excess steam to vent), and give them a blast in the microwave.

If you don’t own a purpose-made plastic steaming container (such as a rice cooker), you can use a regular glass or ceramic bowl instead, covered with a lid, a handy plate, or a sheet of plastic wrap – just make sure there’s enough space for excess steam to escape!

The best microwave for the job…

…can be found at Appliances Online!  We offer a wide assortment of different microwave models to suit Australian households of all shapes and sizes.

We’ll let you decide for yourself which microwave will best suit your kitchen’s unique needs, but if possible we’d recommend an inverter microwave such as the Panasonic Microwave NNST780W – by providing more precise control over the microwave’s power, you’ll be able to cook with a greater degree of finesse than using a typical microwave.

Another alternative is a convection microwave, which combines a microwave with an electric oven for the best of both cooking worlds!