I’m not proud of it, but I must admit that the combined pressure of the many hats I wear often mandates that I make short shrift of dinner, at least during the school year/concert season when I sprint continuously through a steady series of unbreakable deadlines. When one hasn’t a submissive apron-clad spouse at home busily conjuring up a natural-foods wonder, one must turn to those many conveniences that modern life has to offer, thus to streamline the business of dinner and get on with it as efficiently as possible.
Three shortcuts in particular stand out: 1) I can go out to dinner, 2) I can get take-out, or 3) I can toss a frozen dinner into the microwave. Option 1) is not a time-saver as a rule, although it offers a high level of convenience.
That leaves the take-out and the microwave options. Both have their advantages, and I use both as necessary. Today’s article concerns those microwaveable frozen affairs, glorious conveniences as they are, culinary abominations as they are, waistline-busters and artery-cloggers as they are. I allow that I’m playing with fire every time I commit to one of those brightly-colored boxes festooned with fanciful pictures of impossibly pretty food. But when it comes to ease of use, today’s descendant of the old-time-y TV Dinner wins out every time.
Of late I’ve noticed a change in the microwave weather. Until fairly recently, microwave meals touted the elemental simplicity of their preparation: microwave this for ‘x’ minutes, said the instructions.
But now the instructions have become more complicated, more convoluted—even for items I clearly remember as sporting the basic “microwave for x minutes” directions. Now they’re likely to instruct you to microwave on x minutes at high heat, then at y minutes at 50%, with a stop to remove the film cover, stir something, then replace the film cover. It’s almost as though those hardy souls who author microwave instructions just can’t bear the thought of it being so simple, so foolproof, so impersonal. So they play Let’s Complicate Something Simple, like those home-ec cretins who lard a simple recipe for, say, french toast with an imposing series of steps that would leave Escoffier muttering sacre bleu under his breath.
I also suspect that the microwave people want us to feel more involved with our dinner. They aim to to foster a creative frisson in the otherwise humdrum operation of warming up of a frozen dinner. Thus the baroque directives, the loosening of this film and stirring of that item, the setting of the various microwave powers. We’re supposed to feel as though we’re really cooking this thing.
But they’re not fooling anybody. Well, perhaps I should limit myself to the observation that they’re not fooling me. Where needless complication is concerned, I can definitely tell a hawk from a handsaw. So the last time I took a Marie Callendar’s turkey pot pie out of the oven, I recalled that the old, simple instructions said to put it in the microwave for 11 minutes at full power. That’s what I did this time, and it came out just fine, or at least as fine as a conglomeration of fat and salt can be said to come out. No need to follow their chemistry-lab-manual’s worth of instructions. Just throw it in and push the START button.
A few rejoinders to commonly-encountered microwave directives:
- Carefully cut a thin slit in the plastic covering. Nah. Just lift up one of the corners a bit. That’s enough to let the steam escape, and the microwave will stay cleaner.
- Cook for x minutes at full power, then y minutes at 50% power. Don’t bother. Just cook at high power. Subtract a few minutes from the total cooking time.
- Halfway through, remove the film cover and stir the sauce. It won’t matter, so skip it. You’re not at Gary Danko. It’s a frozen dinner, remember?
- Let it stand for five minutes after it finishes cooking. A minute or so is enough. They’re just trying to protect their butts in case you burn yourself.
- After cooking, carefully cut the pouch open and then pour the contents onto a plate. Ridiculous, and often messy. Don’t cook it in the pouch. Just run the plastic pouch under hot water for a bit, dump the contents into a microwave-safe bowl, and cook it in there.
- Halfway through, give the dish a half-turn. Only if your microwave doesn’t have one of those carousel-thingies, which most of them do. Even then, you can skip it.
To sum up: there is a time and a place for creativity, for inspiration, for that certain je ne sais quoi that makes all the difference between fine dining and just stoking up the furnace with enough calories to last another day. We all honor and cherish those times and places, I should hope.
But popping a frozen dinner into the microwave after a long busy day isn’t it. Microwave dinners are strictly cattle-car trade, offering speed and convenience in lieu for even the faintest whiff of culinary sophistication.
So I end with a memo to frozen dinner manufacturers everywhere: get over yourselves.