One of Regina’s friends asked for her microwave praline recipe during the holidays. Regina gave it to her from memory instead of checking her recipe files, and the results were disastrous.
She got all of the ingredients right but was a little off on the cooking time. Cooking time in a microwave oven is a big deal.
Regina’s pralines are really good, but she only makes them at Christmastime. She had not made a batch yet this year, so she couldn’t remember exactly how long the candy needed to cook.
She listed the ingredients as her friend wrote them down and then said the pralines should be cooked on high for seven minutes, stirred and cooked seven more minutes.
Her friend called later that day to report that her pralines were black and had the consistency of lava. She said her microwave oven was still smoking.
Regina checked her recipes and found that the pralines should have been cooked for four minutes instead of seven, stirred and then cooked four more minutes. They microwaved six minutes too long.
Her friend’s husband managed to get the smoldering pralines and smoking microwave oven outside. I can picture the oven mitts and goggles. They were waiting a few days to test it before deciding if they needed a new one.
That episode reminded Regina and me of an experience another one of her friends had with a microwave oven a few years ago.
The friend had remarried after going through a divorce. Both she and her new husband had young children, so keeping everybody fed was a challenge.
Trying to speed up breakfast one morning, she just put a dozen eggs on a plate in the microwave and turned it on high. The eggs were still in the shell.
Regina’s friend explained later that she thought the microwave would cook them like boiled eggs.
After microwaving for a while, the eggs started exploding and the door of the oven blew off.
The fellow at the appliance store where she went to get a new microwave said he had seen one other door knocked off a microwave by exploding eggs.
His theory was that a build-up of gases, atoms and molecules discharged by the flaming eggs ripped the door off.
My mother was the best cook I ever knew, but she lost interest in cooking after my dad died. She said it wasn’t worth it to spend all that time in the kitchen preparing meals just for herself.
She was in her seventies and had never owned a microwave. I showed her once when she visited how easy and quick it was to use the oven. She seemed interested, so Regina and I got her one.
We explained to her that microwaves really cut down on cooking time and told her to read the little instruction booklet and cookbook that came with her new oven.
The morning after we left, she called to say the microwave burned up her oatmeal.
I asked how she cooked it. She said she just cooked it about half as long as she usually did on her stove. We told her again not to use the microwave until she read the instructions. That was asking a lot of a lady who rarely read a recipe in all her years of cooking.
A few nights later, she called to say that a chicken and rice dish she had been making for years smoked, melted and turned black in the microwave.
She said she “cut way back” on the cooking time and blamed the whole mess on the boneless chicken she used. She had told me many times that “chicken is not chicken unless it has bones in it.”
I asked her to unplug the microwave and not use it again until we could come check it. Regina and I confiscated it a few days later.
A great movie a few years ago with Christian Bale and Jennifer Lawrence called American Hustle had a scene about a microwave, which they called a “science oven.”
Jennifer Lawrence was skeptical about the oven, which was a gift, but she tried it. She cooked something in a metal container, and the microwave caught fire.
She said that was good, because she had heard microwaves “take all the nutrition out of our food.”
I’m pretty sure there was not much nutrition left in those eggs or the pralines that Regina’s friends made in the science oven.