organiSIM.com - pasta in the microwave

Pasta in a microwave - are you mad???

Yes - you can cook pasta in the microwave! I prefer tagliatelli - like flat spaghetti - (I find that you can get more of it on your fork and it has a good surface area for your choice of sauce), but find it's usually more expensive than other pastas. My favourite alternative is penne and you only have to pay a small premium over regular value spaghetti. This is an ideal practice for cooking using the kitchen facilities of your office.

The following procedure involves use of boiling water, assorted cutlery and other kitchen vessels and utensils. www.organiSIM.com will not accept any resonsibility for any maiming that you cause yourself or others. If you cannot exercise some common sense in the kitchen, then I reckon Darwin can rest easy. Richard Dawkins can put his feet up too. (Or perhaps it's the Almighty's way of realising that you shouldn't be).

The process begins with boiling the water you need in a kettle - you should do this also when cooking pasta conventionally as the kettle is much more efficient at heating the water than the hob.
Warm a large microwave-safe vessel (like a pyrex bowl) with a small amount of the boiling water this helps the prepared boiling water to cook your pasta rather than warming the bowl up and taking longer. Swirl the water around the bowl (careful now) & then discard.
add a pinch of salt to the now empty warm.
add your choice of dry pasta - spaghetti may need to be broken in to smaller pieces - I find breaking spaghetti in two is enough. If using spaghetti, drop it into the bowl bit by bit & either rotate the bowl or your hand so that it is not all parallel within the bowl.
now add the boiling water from the kettle - you may want to have set the kettle to re-boil in case the water has cooled.
get a fork and seperate the pasta - using a gentle stabbing/insising motion
place the bowl into the microwave and cook on high/100% for about 4-5 minutes (this is not an exact science - the power of the microwave is not crucal. The time is more important, but is a matter of personal choice - less time will give you a more "al dente" quality).
repeat the forking to seperate the pasta and re-microwave for another 4-5 minutes
ok, so the pasta's done - fetch the collander & drain.

No collander? how are you supposed to ~~colland~~ drain the pasta? What office kitchen doesn't have a collander? This next bit is tricky - even I have come a cropper with this:

get a tea-towel, fold it twice in half as if you were making a bandana.
remove the bowl from the microwave and place a plate, upside-down over the bowl.
offset the plate so that there is a very small gap on one side. (you can make the gap bigger if using penne, fusilli or shells.)
using the tea-towel, manually clamp the bowl and the plate together - this is a tricky process - you can lose the pasta, the bowl, the plate and even burn yourself on the steam - be careful!

Now you can serve (or as I do - leave it in the hot bowl). One of the best sauces, I find, is Dolmio's Sun-dried tomato stir-in sauce - no cooking required. Other preferred sauces are vegetarian-friendly. Don't get me wrong, I'm not vegetarian, but I'm not against them, some of my friends are vegegtarian... I think that non-meat sauces will have a greater shelf life & are less likely to kill you if not prepared properly.