Challenge 27 Appliance cookbook - Rice pilaf

[hilarita]

This recipe came with my mother's microwave some time in the mid-1980s. Quite a lot of the rest of the cookbook was horrible - this was the time when microwave sellers were earnestly trying to persuade you that you really could do all your cooking with a microwave and they were so, so wrong - but this recipe has survived unscathed. I have never tried to adapt this for the microwaveless. It's a one-dish meal, and feeds 3-4, depending on how hungry they are. It can optionally be made vegetarian, though if you were doing it as a main meal you might want to consider adding some protein.

Ingredients

1 onion

150g mushrooms

2 sticks celery

1 pepper

25g butter

300ml hot water

75g rice

1 stock cube

(optional) 1 cooked chicken breast

Pans & Oven:

1 large pyrex dish (3–4 litres)

a microwave (times are optimised for around 750 watts)

Instructions:

Chop the onion, celery, and pepper. Put them and the butter into the dish,
and microwave on HIGH for 3–5 minutes.

Chop other ingredients, and add everything except the optional chicken to
the dish. Mix and cover.

Microwave for 5 minutes on HIGH, then 10–12 minutes on MEDIUM, until
the liquid is absorbed. Let it stand for 5 minutes.

Comments

[tree_and_leaf]

Ooh - might have to try this!

[hilarita]

The only fiddly bit is working out how long you need to cook it to get the rice to absorb the stock. That seems to be very prone to need adjusting (usually upwards).

[moetushie]

I used to have a collection of microwave cookbooks from the seventies and eighties -- mostly inherited from my aunt who passed them down to me when she was downsizing her house -- and they are, honestly, fascinating. A lot of foods suggested, that, as you say, have no business being cooked in the microwave. What I liked best was the food styling, which was wild and not always edible-looking.

Your pilaf sounds great! Really convenient.

[hilarita]

There was a microwave sponge cake that was surprisingly unawful. (It's not *great* - I used to bake it when I was 7 and wasn't allowed to use the oven unsupervised - now I'd make a proper sponge cake.)