Someone's in the Kitchen With Dinah
To get in practice for the holidays just past I tried making a pumpkin pie with a recipe that called for canned skim milk and a ready-made fat-free, sugar-free graham-cracker crust – only as it happened I was out of the special milk and no grocery store anywhere in MY galaxy had that wondrous crust. AND the guests were due in an hour and suddenly I somehow couldn't FIND the recipe and so had to improvise. The result? Something that looked like what you’d get if you moistened a little kitty litter and patted it onto a pie plate.So maybe I’m not the world's best cook, that’s not such a bad thing, is it? Maybe it’s even a good thing. With some fancy reputation to uphold I might not feel as open as I do to food-prep ideas of every sort – like the ones I found in The Irish Microwave Cookbook that recently presented itself from its hiding place in the back of a kitchen drawer.It was 1993 when one Ann Ward wrote this book over in Ireland, where I guess microwave technology still seemed pretty miraculous. Anyway a tone of total delight underlies every word, appearing not just in the tips but in the recipes themselves, such as the ones for Captain’s Cabbage, Gammon Joint, and those other yucky-sounding-to-us-but-doubtless-perfectly-normal-British-Isles dishes like Fish Pie and Smoked Kippers.It’s when she gets down to the pages and pages of tips that you really feel her sense of satisfaction . So ease gently into this new year. Stow the skillet and see how far YOU can go with Ann’s wise counsel.For example: When cooking meat in the microwave she says, to avoid cheap stewing beef "as it will turn tough." (And you thought boiled meat sounded bad!) Also, she says to trim the fat before cooking - just picture the spattering if you don’t! - and to keep your microwave clean at all times. "Otherwise the microwaves concentrate on the dirt which will throw off your cooking times.” (An odd idea but probably true: Taking meat from ‘raw’ to ‘done’ by using a microwave probably WOULD generate some pretty large blobs of ‘dirt’.)Also she says, “when it comes to boiled eggs it is best not to try these in your microwave,” and there's the understatement of the century. Once when he was in 5th grade my boy and I performed an experiment by taking an egg still in its shell and put it the microwave. The results? Stunning and unforgettable bothAlso, “Cocoa is lovely out of the microwave,” she says and of course cocoa IS lovely, in or out of the microwave, as are many hot beverages "- which fact leads our Ann to her final tip:“Never heat alcohol in the microwave as for making hot whiskey. “You may heat the water and sugar but add the whiskey afterwards. If you try to heat the whiskey on its own it could ignite.” And where would you be THEN, with a whiskey fire blazing away in your magic hot-box? No, the real place for whiskey is very early in the cooking process, which is how my mother and aunt used it the Christmas their dad brought home a fully feathered turkey with its head still on, said “Here you go girls!” and moseyed off to the living room to curl up with his pipe and his paper.That's when they turned to the whiskey, just as I turned to the whiskey just as my very guests turned to the whiskey too - and we all sat down to our lovely lo-cal, no-cal Kitty Litter Pie.So see? Life really can be easy if you let it!
