Romance with Chocolate - Hidden Items instaling

I recently served vegetable soup cooked in a microwave to two keen twentysomething cooks (easy: microwave 400g prepared vegetables covered on high for four minutes, add stock, seasoning and a bit of butter or oil, cover again and microwave for another four minutes before blitzing and adjusting seasoning) and they both said they had never heard of such a thing, let alone tasted it. Most people laughed when I asked whether they actually cooked using one, as opposed to just heating up leftovers, defrosting frozen dinners or warming milk or coffee. Yet I know almost no one who turns to the microwave as their preferred mode of cooking. It gives them the willies because of the mysterious waves jumping around inside.”

In an interview with the Guardian in 2013, Pollan commented that, “nobody wants to get too close to a microwave. The American food writer Michael Pollan spoke for many when he protested – in his book Cooked – that “the microwave oven is as antisocial as the cook fire is communal”. We jest of “nuking” or “zapping” food, or we talk disparagingly of “microwave dinners”, as if the technology’s only real use were heating up ready meals. Yet when the microwave is spoken of, it is usually in negative terms. In 2018, 93% of UK households owned a microwave oven, up from 67% in 1994. It’s hard to think of another household object owned by so many and praised by so few. The joke works only because the microwave is generally so undervalued as a kitchen item. By the following year, the clip of Nigella saying “mee-crow-waa-vay” had become so popular it was nominated for a Bafta. It was a joke, clearly, but some people didn’t understand this and Nigella was forced to explain that she did actually know how microwave was normally pronounced. The food writer was heating milk for mashed potatoes on her TV series Cook, Eat, Repeat when she commented that she liked to heat the milk in a mee-crow-waa-vay, as if it were some kind of obscure yet deeply sophisticated European food gadget. In 2020, Nigella Lawson almost broke the internet just by saying the word “microwave”.

Romance with Chocolate - Hidden Items instaling