Recipes from your plastic wrap!

The Any Oven Cookbook (Saran Wrap, 1981) is just a bit newer than I usually go, but I was intrigued by the premise of providing both microwave oven and conventional directions for the recipes. (Since Saran Wrap is microwave safe, the motive was to sell the plastic film to microwave owners. I guess the addition of conventional directions is an implicit admission that microwaves are mostly better at reheating than cooking, so cooks can still use the cookbook once they give up on trying to make entire dinners from scratch using the microwave.) I also loved all the Pepto-Bismol pink in the cover picture. It's not a great sign when the cover seems to be giving the subconscious suggestion that the recipes will cause indigestion.

The book offers examples of that perennial favorite of microwave cookbooks-- things that would take almost as much time to make without the microwave. My favorite just might be the Shrimp Curry.

Note that the microwave cooking time is 20 minutes, shaving two whole minutes off the conventional cooking time! Of course, if you cook it conventionally, you will not only lose those two precious extra minutes but also miss out on the opportunity to smell shrimp curry anytime anybody microwaves anything for the next week and a half.

The book offers some rather complicated recipes, like this one for Tamales.

The microwave recipe does actually shave more than an hour off the cooking time, but I imagine anyone who wanted to go to the trouble of actually making tamales from scratch might want to use a more traditional method that they're sure will work. Still, I'm impressed that the recipe actually calls for wrapping the tamales in corn husks. I would have expected the book to encourage cooks to roll the tamales in a sheet of Saran Wrap for the microwave version.

A lot of the recipes are pretty conventional, but the book includes some weird ones, like Hot Potato- Apple Salad.

Hot potato salad is pretty common. Sweet potatoes with apples is also pretty common. Hot potato salad with apples, though? Not so much...

The book includes some color pictures of recipes as well. While the recipe for Summer Soup sounds fine, if unexceptional...

I love the picture that accompanies it.

Something about serving it in a big, glass bowl next to drinking glasses that kind of match makes me see this as a big bowl of very odd punch. I can see somebody absentmindedly pouring a ladleful into a glass and then doing a cartoon-character-style double take.

I hope you enjoyed the recipes because now it's a wrap.