An Indie Microwave Cookbook

Creative and Easy Microwave (Bev Flood and Sue Mitchell, 1980) is slightly newer than the books I usually feature, but I was excited to find a microwave cookbook written by a couple of friends rather than by a microwave company. (Admittedly, the "About the Authors" section notes that the women both worked for microwave companies as well, but I assume the recipes they published on their own had to be substantially different from any they sold to Litton or Tappan or General Electric or Amana or wherever else.)

Of course, I'm not sure microwave companies would be all that impressed with some of their conversions of traditional recipes to microwave recipes. Take the ever-popular (in the midwest, anyway) 7-Up Salad, for example.

Did you know that you can boil the water for the Jell-O in the microwave? And if you forgot to soften the cream cheese beforehand, you can microwave that for a few seconds too! This microwave conversion process is so complicated that I'm glad to have a recipe that did the work for me.

Other recipes made me wonder about the point of using a microwave at all. For instance, chicken salad is cold, and I always figured it was mostly a way for people to use up any leftover chicken they found in the fridge. So how did a chicken salad recipe end up in a microwave cookbook?

You have to use it to microwave a whole chicken. No using up leftover chicken for this recipe! And since it uses a whole chicken, the family better really like chicken salad with apples, onion, and pineapple in it, or this stuff might go bad before you can finish it....

I didn't really expect to find grilled sandwich recipes in the book either. I mean, bread in the microwave? Sog-fest! The whole point of a grilled sandwich is the nice, crisp crust contrasting with the soft (and often creamy) filling.

Well, I guess I didn't actually find a grilled sandwich in this book, just one that's usually grilled: a Reuben.

And in the absence of a nice, crisp crust (which I assume is a big part of the appeal, given that Reubens contain two of my arch-nemeses: sauerkraut and Thousand Island Dressing), Flood and Mitchell decide to just really embrace the sog factor. I doubt the rye toast will remain crispy for long when it's microwaved under a heap of corned beef, sauerkraut, and cheese, but just in case it tries to retain a bit of crunch, the whole thing gets doused in a Thousand Island-ish sauce with a condensed cream of onion soup base.

Some of the recipes seem fairly original, though, like this Pineapple Casserole.

Just admire the beauty of the layering: pineapple chunks, miniature "marshmellows," grated cheddar cheese, pineapple juice-based custard, more cheese! Serve it alongside a microwaved ham, and apparently, you're good to go! (I'm almost surprised that the authors don't advocate for converting this to a summer dish by cooking the custardy sauce in the microwave, letting it cool, and then layering everything and chilling it in the fridge to serve as a salad.)

And finally, something with the name of an old classic and enough weird changes that I'm not entirely sure why they still decided to call it Chicken Kiev.

First of all: the filling! While the text says to mix the butter with Kraft Cheese Spread, the ingredients call for margarine. If you're going for Chicken Kiev, the filling is the star, so you don't want margarine! And the butter is supposed to be mixed with herbs like parsley, not cheese spread, MSG, and *checks recipe again just to make sure this is not a hallucination or misremembering* a can of chopped green chilies.

Then once the chicken breasts are wrapped around the, uh, filling, they're coated "with mixture of cheesits and taco seasoning" rather than egg wash and breadcrumbs. Maybe the coating has to be cheesy crackers and taco seasoning so it will have some color? The traditional method of frying browns the butter-filled chicken right up , but these margarine-cheese-spread-chili-filled rolls get cooked in the microwave, of course. That means no browning! 

A more accurate title might be "Chicken 'Kiev' in the Style of Shitty Vaguely Mexican Food," but that is quite a mouthful to say. I can see why the authors kept it to simple Chicken Kiev. And I'm glad that I got a chance to check out the recipes that for some reason did not make it into the major microwave manufacturers' cookbooks.