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rushthatspeaksI have no idea why there is a microwave cookbook published in 1983 in our house. I mean it. It appears to have been on the cookbook shelf for a while, and I know it wasn't me.
Anyway, I initially read this to laugh, because this sort of cookbook is usually full of candidates for the Gallery of Regrettable Food. Which, photography-wise, this one is-- it's photographed in the usual sort of fashionable-at-the-time-but-quickly-gets-dated way.
Some of the recipes are also fairly traumatic, as this cookbook seriously suggests, and I am having as much trouble believing this as you will, that you make punch for your next party by melting Cinnamon Red Hots in water and adding cloves and a little lemon juice. They call it 'Hot Pink Drink'. I just-- that is the sort of thing that one does not serve company; if a person were to like Cinnamon Red Hots that much, I am not saying that is a bad thing, but it should be kept to oneself, as with such other personal vices as Tang, the marshmallows picked out of Lucky Charms, and my own occasional craving for blueberry bagels with peanut butter and thinly sliced jalapenos.
However, as a technical manual of things you can do with a microwave... huh. It seems to think you can poach eggs in one, for one thing, and I may actually have to test that because keeping the water the right temperature on our stove is a high-wire act. It also thinks you can do the pre-baking bit of the kind of pie that needs a cooked shell before the filling goes in, that you can get water boiling to blanch vegetables (I... should have thought of that), and that you can get a substantial distance towards thawing a frozen turkey if you can fit the thing into there. And it thinks you can steam pudding (!). I reserve judgment as to whether any of that is true, as this is also the sort of book where the manufacturer thinks that the microwave is so exciting that you should invite all your friends over simply to stand about and look at it working, which I suspect was not a thing even back when microwaves were far less common. But the blanching vegetables thing is a) definitely true and b) obvious in hindsight, so maybe some of the rest of it is viable, and it's worth checking.
I am therefore totally ignoring everything the book says as to the ways one ought to combine different foods, but keeping it in mind as a thing to refer back to the next time we have to draw up the oven/stove schedule for a holiday, now that I no longer live in a situation where I have access to three ovens and eight working burners (*sob*). The toaster oven eases the load somewhat, but this seems as though it could help the stovetop crunches, which would be kind of awesome.
Anyway, I initially read this to laugh, because this sort of cookbook is usually full of candidates for the Gallery of Regrettable Food. Which, photography-wise, this one is-- it's photographed in the usual sort of fashionable-at-the-time-but-quickly-gets-dated way.
Some of the recipes are also fairly traumatic, as this cookbook seriously suggests, and I am having as much trouble believing this as you will, that you make punch for your next party by melting Cinnamon Red Hots in water and adding cloves and a little lemon juice. They call it 'Hot Pink Drink'. I just-- that is the sort of thing that one does not serve company; if a person were to like Cinnamon Red Hots that much, I am not saying that is a bad thing, but it should be kept to oneself, as with such other personal vices as Tang, the marshmallows picked out of Lucky Charms, and my own occasional craving for blueberry bagels with peanut butter and thinly sliced jalapenos.
However, as a technical manual of things you can do with a microwave... huh. It seems to think you can poach eggs in one, for one thing, and I may actually have to test that because keeping the water the right temperature on our stove is a high-wire act. It also thinks you can do the pre-baking bit of the kind of pie that needs a cooked shell before the filling goes in, that you can get water boiling to blanch vegetables (I... should have thought of that), and that you can get a substantial distance towards thawing a frozen turkey if you can fit the thing into there. And it thinks you can steam pudding (!). I reserve judgment as to whether any of that is true, as this is also the sort of book where the manufacturer thinks that the microwave is so exciting that you should invite all your friends over simply to stand about and look at it working, which I suspect was not a thing even back when microwaves were far less common. But the blanching vegetables thing is a) definitely true and b) obvious in hindsight, so maybe some of the rest of it is viable, and it's worth checking.
I am therefore totally ignoring everything the book says as to the ways one ought to combine different foods, but keeping it in mind as a thing to refer back to the next time we have to draw up the oven/stove schedule for a holiday, now that I no longer live in a situation where I have access to three ovens and eight working burners (*sob*). The toaster oven eases the load somewhat, but this seems as though it could help the stovetop crunches, which would be kind of awesome.
