Can Microwave Oven Cook Properly? No Ray of Hope

Cooking is one of my favorite occupations when my wife is too tired to cook, which has been fairly often lately since she has been hauling old books around for the Friends of the Newport Beach Library.

One of these days I expect to cook a dish in my wife’s rather new microwave oven. That is, as soon as I can work up the courage to do it. If the dish turns out well, I may try some food on it. (Sorry about that one.)

So far that microwave oven intimidates me. A device that emits a series of warning beeps, like a dump truck backing up, should be pretty scary to any cautious person, I should think.

I’m not sure whether it means to run me over, or strike me down with one its radio waves that an instruction book I’ve been studying says is approximately four to six inches long with a diameter of about one-fourth inch. A well-aimed blow with something like that could put a fellow out of commission in a hurry.

Furthermore, the book says, microwaves penetrate the food to a depth up to 1 1/2 inches and then are absorbed by it. It’s hard to believe that food with those one-fourth-inch projectiles in it would be very digestible, especially when you learn you are eating excited molecules as well.

It seems those microwave dingbats excite the molecules in the food, causing them to vibrate at the rate of 2.45 trillion times per second. Food with that many vibrations can’t be easy on the digestive tract.

All Quivery Inside

But, as I say, when I feel particularly adventuresome some day, I’m going to cook something in her microwave, even if eating it makes me all quivery inside.

You may recall that my wife bought her microwave oven while I was away on a trip. She didn’t tell me she was going to do it, although she had been making noises about getting one. When I got home, there it was. At first sight I thought it was a new kind of bread box with push buttons.

Now, my wife is beginning to wish it were a bread box--without push buttons. She is becoming disenchanted with her microwave. It is great for thawing frozen food, cooking vegetables and heating commercial frozen dinners, but when it comes to proper food prepared from scratch she finds it leaves something to be desired.

Her most ambitious project so far has been a hamburger casserole with cheese and strips of bread dough in it. We awaited the finished product with keen anticipation. When the box beeped ominously several times, signaling that the casserole was cooked, she removed it. It was still cold in the middle.

The old habit of baking a casserole in a conventional oven, where it remains until done without further attention, had made her forget to stir it. Cooking most culinary concoctions in a microwave necessitates interrupting the radio-wave bombardment with some stirring.

So she stirred the casserole, put it back in, and we waited patiently for the beeps. (I, coward that I am, stood well out of the oven’s path.) When she was satisfied it was done, what with stirring and waiting during the standing time for it to cook during the recommended “conduction” time, I could have popped a similar casserole in the old-time oven and we would have had dinner ready.

As it was, the microwave produced a pale--but hot, mind you, to its small credit--unpalatable mass, dreadfully doughy. I’ve eaten two-day old bread pudding that was better.

When we tried to eat it, our digestive tracts quivered.

So far, thank goodness, we’ve not suffered from any violent seizures from any of her microwave experiments. Still, I suppose, there’s always a first time. And then again, the machine may spare us that fate by backing over us when we’re looking the other way.